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Query: UMLS:C0036341 (schizophrenia)
 60,220 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Depressive symptoms and suicidal behavior in 64 adolescent psychiatric patients were assessed by a structured interview and the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia. The medical seriousness of suicidal behavior was associated with conscious intent to die and with the number of previous nonlethal suicide attempts. Suicidal behavior was associated with depressed mood, negative self-evaluation, anhedonia, insomnia, poor concentration, indecisiveness, lack of reactivity of mood, psychomotor disturbance, and alcohol and drug abuse. The results suggest that adolescents can be reliable reporters of their suicide potential and that clinicians need to be sensitive to symptoms of major depressive disorder in assessing potentially suicidal adolescents.
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PMID:Depressive symptoms and suicidal behavior in adolescents. 398 97

The distinction between positive and negative symptoms has gained prominence in schizophrenia research, but the construct has not been unequivocally validated. The authors report preliminary findings of investigations in which symptomatic and neuropsychological assessments were conducted in a sample of 32 chronic schizophrenic inpatients. Three distinct clusters of symptoms were identified in correlative analyses. One cluster of symptoms (alogia, attentional impairment, positive formal though disorder, and bizarre behavior) appeared to reflect primarily a disorganization of though independent of current definitions of the positive/negative symptom construct. A second cluster of symptoms (affective flattening, avolition/apathy, and anhedonia) appeared to reflect predominantly blunting of affect and volition. A third cluster (delusions, hallucinations, and "breadth of psychosis") seemed to represent only the florid psychotic features. The first and (to a lesser extent) second clusters of symptoms were selectively associated with neuropsychological impairment. The patterns of neuropsychological deficits correlated with the first cluster of symptoms appeared to be consistent with a process characterized by failure in the development of a normal repertoire of cognitive abilities. It is suggested that the "defect state" may not be a monothetic construct, and that within the domain of "type II" schizophrenia, disturbances of thought may be distinguished from those of affect and motivation.
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PMID:Symptomatic and neuropsychological components of defect states. 403 4

Schizotypal personality (SP) corresponds closely to the concept from which it was derived, "borderline schizophrenia," and represents, in most instances, the intermediate band of the schizophrenia spectrum. Problems often encountered in patients with SP include eccentric social habits, anhedonia, hypersensitivity to criticism, humorlessness, misinterpretation of the moods and statements of others, and inability to fit in socially. While neuroleptic medication may be useful during brief psychotic episodes (to which many patients with SP are prone), the mainstays of treatment are verbal psychotherapies. The chronicity of the condition calls for long-term therapy. An exploratory technique alone seldom suffices; therapy must also include supportive and social-reeducative measures. Modification of socially alienating mannerisms through group therapy and behavioral interventions is often warranted, in addition to one-to-one psychotherapy.
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PMID:Schizotypal personality: psychotherapeutic aspects. 408 51

Psychophysiological anomalies in symptomatic schizophrenic patients, remitted schizophrenic patients, and individuals at heightened risk for a schizophrenic disorder are reviewed with an emphasis on electrodermal anomalies. Two electrodermal anomalies are identified in different subgroups of symptomatic patients: (1) an abnormally high sympathetic arousal and (2) an abnormal absence of skin conductance orienting responses to innocuous environmental stimuli. The same two electrodermal anomalies also have been observed in remitted schizophrenic patients. Among high-risk individuals, the offspring of schizophrenic patients display abnormally high electrodermal responsiveness to aversive stimulation, whereas a substantial proportion of college students who score high on physical anhedonia (a putative risk factor for schizophrenia) exhibit skin conductance nonresponsiveness. Thus, heightened sensitivity to aversive stimulation appears to be associated with a genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, while tonic hyperarousal , which occurs in subgroups of symptomatic and remitted schizophrenic patients, may reflect a later developmental consequence of the underlying vulnerability. Skin conductance nonresponsivity may represent a different developmental consequence associated with the same underlying vulnerability or it may represent a different type of vulnerability. Other psychophysiological anomalies also are promising indicators of the vulnerability to schizophrenia (e.g., deviant smooth pursuit eye movements, attenuated P300 component of the event-related brain potential, reduced electroencephalic (EEG) alpha activity, and heightened EEG delta activity).
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PMID:Psychophysiological dysfunctions in the developmental course of schizophrenic disorders. 672 10

Scales of premorbid adjustment, which generally rely very heavily upon assessment of premorbid social functioning, long have been known to predict some forms of thinking disorder in schizophrenia. Several scales theorized to detect schizophrenia proneness were compared to the Phillips Scale of Premorbid Adjustment to determine whether the characteristics measured by the proneness scales might underlie the predictive power of premorbid social functioning. In a sample of 48 schizophrenics, only the Phillips Scale predicted performance on the Gorham's Proverb Test. These data give no evidence that anhedonia, ambivalence, or perceptual aberration underlie defective schizophrenic social functioning. Cautions and other uses for the schizophrenia proneness scales are discussed.
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PMID:Relationship of scales of schizophrenia proneness and premorbid adjustment to thinking deficits in schizophrenia. 687 63

The vast majority of research programs investigating subjects at high risk for psychopathology have relied on genetic criteria for subject selection. Recent reports, however, have begun to suggest alternative definitions and sets of criteria for the selection of high-risk subjects. One such alternative is a psychometric definition of risk--the selection of subjects on the basis of psychological test data. The present experiment used this strategy to study orienting and habituation to simple auditory stimuli in groups of young adult subjects reporting either physical anhedonia or perceptual aberrations. The study provided support for the hypothesized continuity between anhedonic subjects and the autonomically hyporesponsive group of patients frequently described in the literature on schizophrenia. Results are discussed in light of recent appeals to identify biologically homogeneous subgroups of schizophrenic patients.
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PMID:Electrodermal and cardiac orienting in psychometrically defined high-risk subjects. 694 97

The authors explored the clinical correlates of ventricular enlargement in schizophrenia by comparing 16 patients with "large" ventricles (ventricles more than I SD above the control mean) with 16 patients with the smallest ventricles from a sample of 52 schizophrenic patients. Patients with ventricular enlargement showed some impairment in the sensorium and had a preponderance of "negative" symptoms (e.g., alogia, affective flattening, avolition, anhedonia), while those with small ventricles were characterized by "positive" symptoms (e.g., delusions, hallucinations, positive formal thought disorder, bizarre behavior). These findings suggest that combining a measure of brain structure with the clinical picture may provide a useful new approach to the classification of schizophrenia.
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PMID:Ventricular enlargement in schizophrenia: relationship to positive and negative symptoms. 705 42

Recently, a renaissance of interest in "negative symptoms," eg, affective flattening or impoverishment of speech and language, has occurred. Although some investigators believe that these symptoms are important indicators of outcome, of response to treatment, and perhaps of a distinct, underlying pathologic process, research on the negative-symptom syndrome in schizophrenia has been handicapped because no standard instrument existed to assess it. This investigation reports on the developed Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms. When symptoms are defined by objective behavioral indices, they have excellent interrater reliability. Furthermore, the five symptom complexes defined by the scale (affective flattening, alogia, avolition, anhedonia, and attentional impairment) have good internal consistency, which indicates that the conceptual organization of the scale is also cohesive.
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PMID:Negative symptoms in schizophrenia. Definition and reliability. 716 77

We developed criteria for dividing the schizophrenic syndrome into three subtypes: positive, negative, and mixed schizophrenia. Positive schizophrenia is characterized by prominent delusions, hallucinations, positive formal thought disorder, and persistently bizarre behavior; negative schizophrenia, by affective flattening, alogia, avolition, anhedonia, and attentional impairment. In mixed schizophrenia either both negative and positive symptoms are prominent, or neither is prominent. We explored the validity of these criteria in a variety of ways. Significant differences between the three types were noted using external validators such as premorbid adjustment, indices of cognitive dysfunction, ventricular brain ratio, and course in hospital. The correlational structure of the symptom complexes also provided further support for our approach to subtyping.
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PMID:Negative v positive schizophrenia. Definition and validation. 716 78

Two groups of hypothetically psychosis-prone subjects were chosen from among college students who scored deviantly high on scales of Physical Anhedonia (n = 50) or Perceptual Aberration (n = 65). Scores on these two scales had a small negative correlation, indicating that the scales identify different sets of deviant subjects. These experimental subjects and a control group (n = 66) were interviewed using a modification of the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia--Lifetime Version. A second interview covered social and academic adjustment. Psychotic and psychotic-like symptoms (attenuated forms of psychotic experiences) were scored on a recently devised scale of deviancy. The perceptual aberration subjects exceeded the control subjects on each of several psychotic-like experiences (auditory and visual experiences, thought transmission, passivity experiences, aberrant beliefs), as well as on depression, hypomania, social withdrawal, problems of concentration, deviances in communication and speech, and a composite score for schizotypal features. Anhedonics did not differ from controls on psychotic-like experiences but were more socially withdrawn, had less heterosexual interest and activity, and scored higher on the composite score of schizotypal features. The findings support the hypothesis that the scales identify persons who are at risk for psychosis but probably for different psychoses.
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PMID:Physical anhedonia, perceptual aberration, and psychosis proneness. 744 95


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