Cognitive impairment in geriatric chronic schizophrenic patients: a cross-national study in New York and London

✍ Scribed by Philip D. Harvey; Julian Leff; Noam Trieman; Jeremy Anderson; Michael Davidson

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 1997
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 127 KB
• Volume: 12
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0885-6230
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1099-1166(199710)12:10<1001::aid-gps674>3.0.co;2-0

✦ Synopsis

Severe cognitive impairment has been reported in large numbers of geriatric chronic schizophrenic patients in the US, with this impairment also being related to severe negative symptoms and adaptive de®cits. It is not clear if this impairment is related to the particular environment of the American state hospitals and would not generalize to other countries. In this study, a sample composed of geriatric (age 470 chronic schizophrenic patients in London, who were assessed by the Team for Assessment of Psychiatric Services (TAPS) N 137, and a group of geriatric chronic schizophrenic patients in a New York psychiatric center N 86 were compared for the severity of cognitive impairment and on measures of adaptive functioning. Patients received essentially identical Mini-Mental State Examination (MMSE) scores, but diered on 3/4 measures of adaptive functioning. The correlations among all four aspects of adaptive de®cit and MMSE scores were very similar in the two samples, suggesting that cognitive de®cits and their relationship with adaptive impairments are relatively invariant across dierent psychiatric systems of care, while adaptive functioning de®cits are more variable and possibly more in¯uenced by environmental factors. These data add to previous results suggesting that cognitive impairment is a common feature in poor outcome geriatric patients with schizophrenia.