Good grief, are they still doing studies like that at Manchester Uni? They never were any good at statistics, from memory.
For a start, none of the conditions are hidden, they are merely present. Schizophrenia starts in or just after adolescence. People with Schizophrenia are no more likely to get diabetes than anybody else. T2 diabetes is as common as muck, Schizophrenia isn’t. So there’s bound to be some schizophrenia sufferers who have diabetes - in terms of incidence from the diabetes point of view that’s around the 2.4 times more likely that’s noted. It’s just playing with numbers. It’s what happens when you compare illnesses of very different incidence. It doesn’t work in terms of absolute risk, only when you compare it with other illnesses.
You could use just the same numbers to demonstrate that if you have schizophrenia you are less likely than the general population to get diabetes.
It’s exactly that kind of statistical error that led scientists to believe that pot smokers were more likely to develop schizophrenia, not realising that it was the other way round. Schizophrenics use anything to get rid of their symptoms, and smoking pot, or using other drugs such as alcohol, are the commonest.
