The Relationship between schizophrenic thought disorder and cognitive function

点击翻译按钮获取中文摘要

We examined thought disorder in remitted schizophrenics using the Thought Disorder Index (TDI), an instrument for assessing 23 categories of thought disorder ranging from subtle to flagrant, and Bonn Scale for the Assessment of Basic Symptoms (BSABS), and instrument for assessing subjective experiences. The result of this study suggest that "idiosyncratic verbalization" factor of TDI is characteristic of schizophrenic thought disorder and the subjective symptoms specific to schizophrenia are due to disturbances of "thought", "language", "memory", "attention" in terms of elementary psychology. To elucidate the relationship of schizophrenic thought disorder with the cognitive dysfunction, we evaluate 22 schizophrenics by the TDI, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Wechsler Memory Scale-Revised (WMS-R), Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale-Revised (WAIS-R). The patients showed high TDI scores with a sub-scale pattern specific to schizophrenia, and low achieved categories and high perseverative errors in WCST, and no correlation was found between total TDI score and WCST variables. When the patients were divided into high and low TDI score groups according to the total TDI scores, we found a marginal negative correlation between TDI scores and WCST achieved categories only in the high TDI groups. These suggest that working memory is partly associated with a severity of disordered thinking in a subset of schizophrenia. Also, they showed poor performance except attention/concentration index of WMS-R. total TDI scores significantly correlated with "similarities" and "picture arrangement" index of WAIS-R, and verbal memory index of WMS-R significantly correlated with "similarities", "picture completion" and "picture arrangement" index of WAIS-R. these suggest that schizophrenic though disorder related to verbal categorization and abstraction, conceptualization.