Individuals with schizophrenia who participated in a psychosocial and educative rehabilitation programme showed a 46% improvement in quality of life in the absence of any significant change in symptom severity. In contrast, there was no significant change in quality of life for individuals who continued with supportive rehabilitation. Our preliminary findings highlight the ‘quality of life’ benefits of psychosocial and educative rehabilitation for individuals with schizophrenia who are clinically stable and living in the community.

The Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS) is expected to provide a valuable instrument for routine evaluation of the patient's status and correct interpretation of concentrations measured during therapeutic monitoring of antipsychotic drugs. Inpatient files were searched for information relative to acute episodes and BPRS items were scored every 10 days until discharge from the hospital according to a retrospective scheme. Eighty patients were included, who met DSM III criteria for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Clusters of symptoms that tend to appear together were identified through principal components analysis and are in keeping with factors described previously. Differences with respect to diagnosis further suggest that such clusters convey clinically relevant information. The time course of haloperidol action was also investigated: an average 51 % improvement was observed over the first 10 days, while the proportion of patients showing a 50% or larger BPRS decrease at the time of discharge reached 90%. The prominent contribution of changes in positive, florid symptoms to global improvement is also described. Finally, association of clinical improvement with a shorter period of hospitalization is shown. These results indicate that the BPRS represents a level of abstraction compatible with the way clinicians communicate and that its introduction into routine practice may allow for better description of the course of illness

In a psychosocial treatment study, knowing which participants are likely to put forth adequate effort to maximize their treatment, such as attending group sessions and completing homework assignments, and knowing which participants need additional motivation before engagement in treatment is a crucial component to treatment success. This study examined the ability of the Repeatable Battery for Assessment of Neuropsychological Status (RBANS) Effort Index (EI), a newly developed measure of suboptimal effort that is embedded within the RBANS, to predict group attendance in a sample of 128 middle-aged and older adults with schizophrenia. This study was the first to evaluate the EI with a schizophrenia sample. While the EI literature recommends a cutoff score of >3 to be considered indicative of poor effort, a cutoff of >4 was identified as the optimal cutoff for this sample. Receiver Operating Characteristics curve analyses were conducted to determine if the EI could predict participants who had high versus low attendance. Results indicated that the EI was successfully able to discriminate between group attendance, and this measure of effort appears to be most valuable as a tool to identify participants who will have high attendance. Of interest, overall cognitive functioning and symptoms of psychopathology were not predictive of group attendance. (JINS, 2013, 19, 1–8)

Patients with dementia, particularly those with frontotemporal dementia (FTD), are reported to display marked negative symptoms, including apathy, lack of initiative, and flattened affect, similar to those observed in schizophrenic patients. However, negative symptoms have yet to be formally quantified in an FTD population. Twenty-seven patients with FTD (11 primarily right-sided, 8 primarily left-sided, and 4 symmetric) and 7 patients with Alzheimer's disease were rated on the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms, the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale, and the Emotional Blunting scale. The FTD patients registered significantly more negative symptoms than the Alzheimer's patients, averaging a threefold increase; groups did not significantly differ in positive symptoms. Negative symptom scale scores were negatively correlated with nonverbal executive skills (23–44% shared variance), verbal executive skills (up to 25% shared variance) and verbal memory (up to 20% shared variance), but were unrelated to measures of attention, verbal and nonverbal information processing, nonverbal memory, language, and constructional skill. In contrast, positive symptoms were positively correlated with constructional skill (19% shared variance) and attentional scores (15% shared variance). These findings add to the existing literature relating negative symptoms to anterior cerebral hypofunction, and suggest that positive symptoms, at least in this population, may be tied to increased posterior activation. (JINS, 2003, 9, 698–709.)