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

Even with the best treatment available in the United States, people with schizophrenia often remain troubled by auditory hallucinations. Given the less than optimal results of traditional mental health care, the following exploratory study was conducted. A convenience sample of 33 adult outpatients with schizophrenia were interviewed to elicit what (if any) self-help strategies they used for coping with auditory hallucinations. The patients were all being treated at a community mental health clinic. The self-help strategies reported by the patients included (a) physiological changes, (b) cognitive processes, and (c) behavioral changes. The strategies were then rank-ordered by frequency of use and self-reported effectiveness. Various self-help strategies used by subgroups were examined. Men used techniques that were more isolative, and women used more interpersonal techniques to cope with their auditory hallucinations. Participants hearing hostile "voices" (both men and women) tended to use substances such as alcohol and prescribed medications. The results of this study may be used to increase understanding of socially appropriate self-help coping strategies in patients with schizophrenia who experience auditory hallucinations.
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PMID:Self-help techniques for auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia. 775 33

Retrospective chart review was used to compare the demographic characteristics and psychiatric diagnoses of 150 consecutive female patients seen in psychiatric consultation in the emergency service at a Veterans Affairs medical center between 1987 and 1991 with those of two groups of 150 male patients matched by age or psychiatric diagnosis. Compared with the men, the women were younger and more likely to be divorced, to complain of anxiety or psychotic symptoms, and to have a diagnosis of a depressive disorder or borderline personality disorder. Men were more likely to have a diagnosis of schizophrenia or antisocial personality disorder.
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PMID:Characteristics of male and female veterans who use VA psychiatric emergency services. 779 18

We studied a large sample of rigorously diagnosed, generally unmedicated patients with major depressive disorder (n = 179), bipolar affective disorder (n = 102), or schizophrenia (n = 125) to determine if increased cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) protein is associated with a particular diagnosis or gender. Men had a higher mean CSF protein level than women across all diagnoses (p < 0.001). There were no differences across diagnosis among the female patients. Men with unipolar depression had a higher mean CSF protein content than other male patients (n = 0.029), but depressed bipolar males had an equivalently elevated mean level. Considered apart from unipolar or bipolar diagnosis, the depressive syndrome was strongly associated with increased CSF protein in men (p = 0.004); again, there was no difference across type of illness (depression versus mania) among women. Elevated CSF protein content seems to be associated with illness syndrome rather than diagnosis, and may represent an important finding among men with depression.
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PMID:Elevated cerebrospinal fluid protein in men with unipolar or bipolar depression. 803 97

Female chronic mental patients are likely to have induced abortions, give up children for others to raise, and to engage in unprotected sexual intercourse. There are few studies, however, on the family planning attitudes and needs of male psychiatric patients. 35 male chronic mental patients aged 23-49 years of mean age 36 at the psychiatric outpatient clinic of a publicly-funded general hospital in the Harris County district of Houston, Texas, responded to interview questions about their social situation, medical and sexual histories, previous children, attitudes toward family planning and contraceptive practices, and sources of information about family planning. Findings on their knowledge of AIDS and health locus of control are reported under separate cover. The hospital serves predominantly indigent and uninsured patients. Men 50 years or older were excluded from consideration in the study because it was thought they would be less likely to father future children. The sample was comprised of 30 black males, 4 white males, and one Hispanic male of mean education 11 years. Five men were currently married and nine more had been married at some point in the past. Patients had been attending the clinic for an average of 7 years, in a range of 0.5-27 years, with 17% reporting histories of psychiatric hospitalization within the past year. Diagnoses taken from patients' charts included schizophrenia among 26, schizoaffective disorder among two, organic mental disorder among four, and major affective disorder among two; one patient had an Axis II diagnosis of a severe personality disorder. All patients were being treated with psychotropic medications and all but three were being treated with neuroleptics. The interviews took place over the course of 9 months. 18 patients reported having fathered a total of 41 children. 60% of the children less than 16 years old, however, were not being raised by their biological father. 57% of the men reported having had sexual intercourse within the last year, with 26% reporting three or more sex partners during the period. 41% of the men who had sexual intercourse during the preceding year and had not wanted children reported that they or their sex partner had not used contraception during the most recent episode of intercourse. Many patients in the sample were therefore at significant risk of fathering unwanted children and contracting and/or transmitting sexually transmitted diseases. The authors discuss strategies for preventing unwanted pregnancies within this population.
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PMID:Family planning needs of male chronic mental patients in the general hospital psychiatry clinic. 803 81

This retrospective study evaluated differences between patients with first manifestation of schizophrenic psychosis (ICD 295) or paranoid syndrome (ICD 297) between the ages of 18 and 23 or 40 and 63 years. Gender-specific variations in psychopathology were also examined. The numerous analyses of variance gave few significant differences. Patients with a late onset of the disease scored higher on depressive and autonomic syndrome scales at admission, whereas patients with an early onset showed more psychosocial impairment at discharge and their stay in hospital was longer. Among schizophrenic patients only (ICD 297 excluded), only the higher score for autonomic syndrome of the older patients at admission was confirmed. Men were more apathetic at admission and discharge than were women. Excluding patients with a paranoid syndrome, these differences were again significant. Moreover, schizophrenic men had higher depressive and psycho-organic syndrome scores at discharge. The demonstration of only marginal differences between early- and late-onset schizophrenia does not support the assumption that age of onset markedly influences psychopathology.
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PMID:Age of onset in schizophrenia: relations to psychopathology and gender. 814 19

Identification of alcohol abuse in psychiatric patients is essential, since it can confuse the clinical picture and complicate treatment. The utility and reproducibility of the Self-Administered Alcoholism Screening Test (SAAST) was assessed in 236 acutely ill psychiatric patients. Both an initial SAAST given at admission, and a second SAAST given shortly before discharge, were completed by 173 (73%) patients; significant correlation (r = 0.85) was found between scores on SAAST 1 and SAAST 2. Only 41 (17%) patients were unable or refused to complete the initial SAAST and the majority of these received a schizophrenia diagnosis. SAAST scores were also significantly correlated with the clinical assessments and histories. Most (76%) patients with a current or past history of alcohol abuse scored in the "alcoholic" (> or = 8) range on one or both SAASTs. Men were almost twice as likely as women to have a history of alcohol abuse, and significantly more likely to score > or = 8 on the SAAST. The SAAST could be completed by the majority of acutely ill psychiatric patients even at admission, and was clinically useful in the diagnosis of alcohol abuse, especially when used in conjunction with the clinical interview.
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PMID:Reliability of the Self-Administered Alcoholism Screening Test (SAAST) in psychiatric inpatients. 829 41

Schizophrenic patients have been shown to have a moderate excess of winter births in the areas where seasonal variations in weather are large. In this report, we examined the seasonality of schizophrenic births in Taiwan, which has a subtropical climate. Using nationwide hospitalization data (2429 male and 1320 female schizophrenic patients), we applied the life table method to compare the risk of schizophrenia among 12 cohorts of month-of-birth for males and females, respectively. Differences among the risks of the 12 cohorts were tested using the logrank test. The samples were further stratified by family history and age at onset. There was a significant association between the risk of being admitted as a schizophrenic and month of birth for both males and females. The cohorts born in November and January had the highest risks. After stratification, the association was significant only for non-familial, male, and early onset schizophrenic patients. The results indicate that seasonally varying factors might increase the risk of schizophrenia, especially in those without a family history of the disease. Men are more vulnerable to such factors than women, and the schizophrenics resulting from such insults tend to be early onset.
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PMID:Month of birth and schizophrenia in Taiwan: effect of gender, family history and age at onset. 879 1

Differences on symptoms and anamnestic variables were studied in a sample of 112 Canadian patients (42 men and 70 women) who met DSM-III criteria for schizophrenia. Men were more often rated as providing unreliable information than were women. A smaller proportion of men than women showed spontaneous remissions (a return to premorbid level), and fewer men also displayed phasic changes in appetite, weight, or sexual activity. It is noteworthy that men and women did not differ on general indices of severity of illness such as the number of past hospitalizations or length of hospital stay. In contrast to numerous past studies, an earlier age of onset of the illness for men was nonsignificant.
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PMID:Symptom patterns in schizophrenia for men and women. 924 91

The Continuous Performance Test (CPT) has been modified to be used widely as a potential vulnerability marker of schizophrenia. In genetic analyses of schizophrenia, well-established norms for the CPT are essential in choosing a suitable threshold of CPT for classifying subjects as affected or unaffected. In this study, we investigated the performance of 115 adolescents and 345 adults, randomly sampled from a community, on two sessions of the CPT 1-9 (undegraded and 25% degraded). The results showed that an older age was associated with a decreasing hit rate and sensitivity (d'), while a higher level of education was associated with an increasing hit rate and d' for both sessions of the CPT. Men had higher hit rates and d' than women for the degraded CPT. A practice effect during the second session of the CPT was noted among 20 to 33 percent of the subjects. Poorer CPT performance was associated with schizotypy measured by the Perceptual Aberration Scale and the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire. Thus, in assessing CPT performance among schizophrenia patients or high-risk populations, we must compare their results to age-, education-, and sex-corresponding norms. The data presented in this report will be valuable in this regard.
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PMID:Performance of the Continuous Performance Test among community samples. 950 54

It has been suggested that schizophrenia and alcoholism are associated with violent behavior. But so far there are no published studies from unselected cohorts quantifying the actual risk associated with schizophrenia both with and without comorbid alcoholism. In this study, an unselected birth cohort (n = 11,017) was prospectively followed to the age of 26, and data on psychiatric disorders and crimes were collected from national registers. The odds ratios for violent offenses and recidivism were calculated for each diagnostic group. Men who abused alcohol and were diagnosed with schizophrenia were 25.2 (95% confidence interval (CI) 6.1-97.5) times more likely to commit violent crimes than mentally healthy men. The risk for nonalcoholic patients with schizophrenia was 3.6 (95% CI 0.9-12.3) and for other psychoses, 7.7 (95% CI 2.2-23.9). None of the patients with schizophrenia who did not abuse alcohol were recidivists (> 2 offenses), but the risk for committing more crimes among alcoholic subjects with schizophrenia was 9.5-fold (95% CI 2.7-30.0). This study suggests that to prevent the crimes being committed by people with schizophrenia, it is important that clinicians watch for comorbid alcohol abuse.
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PMID:Schizophrenia, alcohol abuse, and violent behavior: a 26-year followup study of an unselected birth cohort. 971 35


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