Schizophrenic adolescents show broad cognitive deficits

Main Category: Schizophrenia
Article Date: 31 May 2004 - 0:00 PDT

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Adolescents with schizophrenia spectrum disorders demonstrate a similar pattern of impaired cognitive functioning as adults in all areas except sustained attention, study findings show. "In contrast to studies of cognitive functioning in adults with schizophrenia, there has been a relative paucity of studies assessing adolescents with schizophrenia," observe Torill Ueland (University of Oslo, Norway) and colleagues.

They note the importance of addressing cognitive dysfunction in young schizophrenic patients because of between early age of disease onset and poor premorbid status, a worse prognosis and outcome, and an increased severity of symptoms.

The researchers therefore investigated cognitive functioning in 22 adolescents with an average age of 15 years who had schizophrenia spectrum disorders. Their performance on a series of cognitive tests was compared with that of 30 mentally healthy control individuals.

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