Dear Editor,

Individuals diagnosed with a severe mental illness (SMI) hold a significantly increased risk of obesity, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease (Teasdale et al., 2017; Gurusamy et al., 2018). Elevated cardiovascular risk for individuals diagnosed with SMI may be attributable to numerous factors, prominently including a cluster of clinical features that define the metabolic syndrome (MetS): abdominal adiposity, atherogenic dyslipidemia, hypertension, and impaired fasting glucose/ diabetes (Kucerova et al., 2015). The incidence rate of MetS and obesity among patients diagnosed with schizophrenia has been estimated to be as high as 54% and 40–50% respectively, twice that observed in the general population (Gurusamy et al., 2018;Fan et al., 2010).