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Link between heart disease and mental health investigated
Author: Olivia Rose-Innes
Published: 04/03/2016

Link between heart disease and mental health investigated.

An ambitious multidisciplinary project is underway at Stellenbosch University to investigate the link between neuropsychiatric and cardiovascular illness. Previous international research has found that people with neuropsychiatric disorders tend to have shorter lifespans than the general population, and that they die most often from cardiovascular disease.

The "Shared Roots" Project, funded by a prestigious Flagship Project grant from the Medical Research Council, aims to better understand the causative factors for this pattern.

Prof Soraya Seedat, head of the Department of Psychiatry and Shared Roots' principal investigator, says: "There's a mistaken public perception that the mentally ill die primarily from unnatural causes – suicide, or from being involved in dangerous behaviour. It's often surprising even to medical practitioners outside the field of psychiatry that patients with severe mental illness have a significantly higher risk than healthy people of dying from common natural causes like heart disease."

"We know that genes and the environment (including the social environment) are contributing to the high level of co-occurrence with cardiovascular disease, but we're trying to find the more intricate links between these, and to think about the causative factors in a more integrated way," says Seedat.

Shared Roots involves collaboration among a large number of researchers with complementary interests, primarily from the Departments of Psychiatry, Neurology and Biomedical Sciences (Genetics), as well as Human Genetics on the Stellenbosch Campus. Brain imaging is an important element of the project, and this will be conducted by radiologists with the Cape Universities Brain Imaging Centre (CUBIC). Given the large amount of data being generated that will require processing, Shared Roots is also working closely with the South African National Bioinformatics Institute at the University of the Western Cape.

Three neuropsychiatric disorders have been chosen as the main foci of Shared Roots, both because of their importance in terms of high prevalence and disease burden in South Africa and globally, and because they accord with faculty research interests: schizophrenia; post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); and Parkinson's disease.

Click here to read the full article.

Photo: Profs Soraya Seedat and Jonathan Carr with Doctors Leigh van der Heuvel and Sian Hemmings.

This article appeared in the Faculty of Medicine and Health Sciences' annual publication. Visit www.sun.ac.za/FMHSpublications to subscribe.