The study conducted by Tapio Paljärvi et al., titled "Cardiovascular mortality in bipolar disorder: population-based cohort study," sheds crucial light on the alarming rates of cardiovascular disease mortality among individuals with bipolar disorder. 1 The findings underscore a significant excess in mortality due to various cardiovascular causes, including coronary artery disease, cardiomyopathy, and hypertensive heart disease. This issue is part of a larger problem for people with severe mental illnesses (SMI), such as schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and major depressive disorders. Individuals with SMI die up to 15 years earlier than the general population, and around 70% of this mortality gap is due to physical disorders. 2 Increased risk of physical disorders in those with mental disorders is due to reduced access to adequate physical health monitoring, care and prevention, 3-5 increased risk of adverse health behaviors 6 such as sedentary behavior, poor diet, and smoking, comorbid substance abuse, and side effects of psychiatric medications. 7 Despite the availability of clinical practice guidelines and evidence-based interventions aimed at reducing excess mortality rates due to physical comorbidities in persons with SMI, the problem still persists. There is a crucial need to better understand how to implement clinical practice guidelines and evidence-based interventions successfully in the real world. Individuals with comorbid mental and physical disorders face specific challenges in service organization, requiring complex treatment and intense resource utilization. 8 The management of multimorbidity is recognized to be complex, with a high treatment burden in terms of understanding and selfmanaging the conditions, attending multiple appointments, and managing complex drug regimens. 9 Evidence suggests that a key part of the problem is the lack of integration of care across service settings. There is major fragmentation in how care is coordinated between family doctors and hospitals, between physical and mental health care, and across health and social care. As proposed by Tapio Paljärvi et al. 1 and other authors, 10 person-centered and integrated care models are a critical step to support effective implementation approaches to translate evidence into practice.
