Letter to the Editor
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World J Psychiatry. Aug 19, 2022; 12(8): 1112-1114
Published online Aug 19, 2022. doi: 10.5498/wjp.v12.i8.1112
Underlying disease may increase mortality risk in users of atypical antipsychotics
Zhi-Peng Li, Yu-Shun You, Jun-Dong Wang, Lian-Ping He
Zhi-Peng Li, Yu-Shun You, Jun-Dong Wang, Lian-Ping He, School of Medicine, Taizhou University, Taizhou 318000, Zhejiang Province, China
Author contributions: Li ZP contributed conceptualization and writing of the original draft; You YS and Wang JD contributed formal analysis and writing of the original draft; He LP contributed writing, reviewing, and editing; all authors participated in drafting the manuscript and all have read, contributed to, and approved the final version of the manuscript.
Supported by Curriculum Reform Project of Taizhou University in 2021, No. xkg2021087.
Conflict-of-interest statement: All the authors report no relevant conflicts of interest for this article.
Open-Access: This article is an open-access article that was selected by an in-house editor and fully peer-reviewed by external reviewers. It is distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial (CC BY-NC 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt, build upon this work non-commercially, and license their derivative works on different terms, provided the original work is properly cited and the use is non-commercial. See: https://creativecommons.org/Licenses/by-nc/4.0/
Corresponding author: Lian-Ping He, PhD, Teacher, School of Medicine, Taizhou University, No. 1139 Shifu Avenue, Jiaojiang District, Taizhou 318000, Zhejiang Province, China. lianpinghe@tzc.edu.cn
Received: March 1, 2022
Peer-review started: March 1, 2022
First decision: April 18, 2022
Revised: July 19, 2022
Accepted: July 19, 2022
Article in press: July 19, 2022
Published online: August 19, 2022
Processing time: 170 Days and 5 Hours
Core Tip

Core Tip: Schizophrenia is a group of the most common types of mental illness. Type I schizophrenia involves mainly positive symptoms and type II schizophrenia involves mainly negative symptoms. The patients are indifferent and lack initiative. Clinically, atypical antipsychotics are often used as first-line drugs for first-episode schizophrenia. Although antipsychotics may increase mortality to some extent, observational studies suggest that atypical antipsychotics are associated with a lower risk of all-cause mortality when compared with conventional antipsychotics.