الفهرس 
SCHIZOPHRENIA
Management of SchizophreniaOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Schizophrenia is a severe and persistent mental disorder that
places significant burden on the individuals who suffer
from it, as well as their families and society. The illness is
defined by the presence of positive (i.e., hallucinations,
delusions, disorganized thinking) and negative (i.e., poverty of
speech, lack of motivation, flat affect) symptoms.
Schizophrenia occurs throughout the world. The
prevalence of schizophrenia (ie, the number of cases in a
population at any one time point) approaches 1 percent
internationally. The incidence (the number of new cases
annually) is about 1.5 per 10,000 people.
Slightly more men are diagnosed with schizophrenia than
women (on the order of 1.4:1), and women tend to be
diagnosed later in life than men.
There is also some indication that the prognosis is worse
in men.
About 30 to 50% of people with schizophrenia fail to
accept that they have an illness or their recommended
treatment.
While schizophrenia is noted for its psychotic symptoms
and deficit features, cognitive impairments are important
aspects of the illness as well. While these cognitive
impairments are well known as predictors of different aspects
of real-world functional outcomes, social disability inschizophrenia may have a number of additional determinants.
One of the domains where in impairments may contribute to
social disability in schizophrenia is social cognition. This is an
area that is receiving an increase in attention that parallels the
increased interest in cognition in schizophrenia over the past 10
years.
Social cognition is defined as the ability to make
inferences based on emotional information (emotion,
perception or recognition), the ability to correctly identify and
respond to social interactions and social rules or knowledge
(social perception), and the ability to make inferences about
another person’s thoughts, feelings, and intentions.
Impairment in each of these domains has been shown to
have a significant impact on functional outcome in clients
diagnosed with schizophrenia and explains variance in
functional outcome beyond that accounted for by elementary
neurocognition.
Social cognition can be understood through a conceptual
model which involves four specific domains: theory of mind
(ToM), attribution style (AS), emotion recognition (ER) and
social perception (SP).
Our study was a case control study; sample was divided
into two groups:
group A: 100 patients with schizophrenia.
group B: 100 subjects of healthy volunteers.Patients were selected from Al-Ma’amoura outpatient
clinics from the first of September of 2014 to the first of May
2015, fulfilling the criteria of schizophrenia according to ICD
10, aging between 25 & 50 years old, and both male and female
genders were included.
The aim of the current study was:
1. To assess social cognition functioning among a sample of
outpatients presenting with schizophrenia.
2. To correlate between symptom profile & disease severity of
schizophrenia and social cognition.
In our study we used Mayer–Salovey–Caruso Emotional
Intelligence Test (MSCEIT) to assess social cognition,
Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) to assess cognition and
we used Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and
to assess symptom severity of schizophrenia.
Results of this study revealed that:
Using MSCEIT results showed statistically significant
difference between patients and healthy control in total score,
experiential area and strategic area.
Low total score in patients reflect decreased capacity to
reason with emotion and to use emotion to enhance thought.
Low experiential area score in patients reflect less
identification of emotion and its productive use in thought.Low strategic area score in patients reflect impaired
reasoning about emotions, how they develop over time, how
they may be managed, and how to fit emotional management
into social situations.
Our results also showed significant difference between
patients and healthy control only in two branches; facilitating
branch and management branch of MSCEIT.
Low facilitating branch score in patients reflect difficulty
in generating emotions to compare and contrast with the
sensory modalities.
Low management branch score in patients reflects that
patients are prone to misread a situation and blame out, blame
others, feel a victim, feel others hurt them, get angry or
withdraw, and want others to do something to make them feel
better (low self-management).
They may also not be able to identify/empathise with
another’s emotions, but will react to another’s emotion with
self-judgment (low social management).
Using wisconsin card sorting test showed statistically
significant difference between patients and healthy control in
percent of conceptual level responses and categories completed.
Percent of conceptual level responses and categories
completed of WCST had low score that reflect impairment in
concept formation in patients with schizophreniain the study
sample.As regard correlation between PANSS scale total score
and categories completed & perseverative errors subscales in
WCST; they was statistically significant.
There was also a statistically significant correlation
between PANSS scale general psychopathology score and
perseverative errors subscale in WCST.
On the other hand, it was also detected that there was no
statistically significant correlation between PANSS scale and
MSCEIT scale.
from the previous data we concluded that patients with
schizophrenia have low self & social management and they also
have lower capacity to use emotion to enhance thought than
healthy people.
Our results also conducted that patients with
schizophrenia had impairment in concept formation.
There was no correlation between emotional intelligence
and symptoms of schizophrenia while performance of patients
in WCST is affected by severity of symptoms of schizophrenia.