Abstract:

Schizophrenia is a chronic mental disorder that often co-occurs with weight gain issues, which impacts medication adherence and symptom recovery in patients, and increases the risk of metabolic and cardiovascular diseases. However, the specific mechanism of weight gain in the patients with schizophrenia remains incompletely understood. Potential factors include increased appetite and abnormal glucose and lipid metabolism due to the effects of antipsychotic drugs on multiple neurotransmitter receptors, shared pathogenesis between schizophrenia and obesity, and unhealthy dietary preferences and lifestyles among the patients with schizophrenia. In recent years, the progress in non-pharmacological interventions in the treatment of weight gain in schizophrenia has been continuously updated, which mainly includes lifestyle interventions, bariatric surgery and neuromodulation technology. Lifestyle interventions include diet, exercises and cognition, and the effectiveness of comprehensive lifestyle intervention models and compliance of patients have become the mainstream of research. Bariatric surgery has a weight loss effect on obese patients with schizophrenia who meet the surgical indications, but the total number of reported cases is still small, and further exploration of perioperative symptom management is needed. In neuromodulation technologies, repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) appears to be promising in the treatment of weight gain in the patients with schizophrenia. The aim of this article is to provide more diversified clinical strategies for the treatment of weight gain in schizophrenia.

Key words: schizophrenia, weight gain, lifestyle intervention, bariatric surgery, neuromodulation technology