Health care and mental illness

Blog Post by David Gardner, Professor of Psychiatry, Dalhousie University

Read also Cardiovascular Disease responsible for shorter life expectancy in people with mental illness

The health care received by people living with a major mental illness (outside of mental health care) is less frequent, of a lower standard, and leads to poorer outcomes when compared to the general population. This has been found in studies of people with a mental illness who also have hypertension, diabetes, HIV/AIDs, a major cardiovascular event, and so on. Two reports have offered striking examples of this.

The Evolution of Disease in a Rapidly Changing World

Joy Henry is a blogger for An Apple A Day and a writer specializing in online nursing degrees for Guide to Healthcare Schools.

As humans evolve and the world they live in changes, the types and prevalence of disease they get changes as well. And while both environment and genes can be responsible for different diseases, a new study is shedding light on the crossroads between them. New research out of Stanford Medical School shows that as humans’ environments change quickly and drastically (which often happens), genes can become selected which simultaneously make them more fit and more susceptible to a certain disease. The old Darwinian mantra of positive benefit, positive selection becomes complicated when environment changes at an unprecedented pace.