Abstract

Obesity is highly prevalent among patient with schizophrenia. It is therefore important to know whether lifestyle factors could contribute to obesity. The objective of this paper is to study the prevalence of overweight, obesity and high waist circumference (WC) in relation to Binge eating and lifestyle factors among patients with schizophrenia. This is a cross sectional study for a period of three and a half months which systematically selected patients with schizophrenia who fulfilled the inclusion criteria. The diagnosis of schizophrenia was made using Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV (SCID). The diagnosis of Binge Eating Disorder (BED) and the assessment of lifestyle factors were made using Eating Disorder, Module H of SCID and Health Promoting Lifestyle Profile II (HPLP II) respectively. The prevalence of overweight was 39.2 %, obesity was 35.1 % and high waist circumference was 63.9 %. The difference between presence of BED among patients who had normal and either overweight or obese was not significant (?2 with Yates correction 3.34, p=0.06). BED was found to be more in patients with high WC (n=11, 78.6 %) than those with normal WC (n=3, 21.4 %) but the difference was not significant (?2=1.88, p=0.21). In term of lifestyle factors, no significant different found between those who smoke and those who did not smoke in relation to BMI (?2=0.00, p=0.98) and WC (?2=0.15, p=0.90). There was no difference between total score of diet and exercise among patients who had normal weight and those who were either overweight or obese in relation to BMI (t=1.30, p=0.20) and WC (t=0.91, p=0.36) and BMI (t=0.80, p=0.43) and WC (t=0.02, p=0.98) respectively. There were also no differences between total score of all four domains of psychological lifestyle i.e. stress management, health responsibility, spiritual growth and interpersonal relationship among patients who had normal weight and those who were overweight and obese in relation to BMI and WC (p>0.05). Presence of Binge eating disorder and the lifestyle factors did not contribute to obesity among patients with schizophrenia. Keywords: Schizophrenia, obesity, lifestyle, binge eating disorder