Schizophrenia is 2nd highest risk factor for dying of COVID-19, after age [View all]

[Beringia]

https://www.livescience.com/schizophrenia-covid-19-death-risk-factor.html

EXCERPTS

The researchers did not find an association between anxiety or mood disorders and death from COVID-19. But they found that people with schizophrenia were about 2.7 times more likely to die from COVID-19 than people without that mental disorder — the second-highest risk factor after age.

"It seemed as though there's something about either the illness of schizophrenia or possibly medications that causes them to be at really high risk of mortality," Goff told Live Science. For example, perhaps the illness or medications are disrupting the immune system, he said. Previous research has found that people with schizophrenia can have altered immune responses and variations in the genes that regulate the body's immune response to infections.

"This is a highly interesting study, especially with regard to the role of the immune system," said Dr. Norbert Müller, a professor of psychiatry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, Germany,who was not involved with the study. Some psychiatrists speculate that schizophrenia is associated with the activation of the immune system and pro-inflammatory signalling molecules known as cytokines, he said. A common cause of COVID-19 death is an overreaction of those cytokines, also known as a cytokine storm.

"Such a mechanism could also play a role in schizophrenia and be a common pathway of schizophrenia and fatal course in COVID-19," Müller told Live Science. But the genes that instruct and regulate the immune response could also play a role, he added. Still, the study was limited by the low number of schizophrenia patients, he said, and also by the lack of data on patients' psychosis medications (which the authors also mention).