Elsevier

Schizophrenia Research

Volume 195, May 2018, Pages 78-79
Schizophrenia Research

Letter to the Editor
Temporal stability of self-disorders and longitudinal unfolding of symptom dimensions: A complementary analysis

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.schres.2017.08.024Get rights and content

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Analytic procedure

We extrapolated the set of inter-correlations among psychopathological dimensions from Nordgaard et al. (2017) and tested the longitudinal unfolding of SD with respect to the other explored symptom dimensions (i.e. PANSS positive and negative symptoms) through a network model. Comparisons between correlations in the same sample were calculated with the test of Steiger by using the “cocor” package running in R (Diedenhofen and Musch, 2015).

Results

The (longitudinal) psychopathological trajectories across symptom dimensions are shown in Fig. 1, which reveals the increasing strength of their temporal interconnectedness over the 5 years' follow-up. In particular: a) the homotypic positive association (longitudinal autocorrelations) between SD at baseline and at follow-up, and negative symptoms at baseline and at follow-up are of comparable magnitude (Steiger's test: z = 1.73, p = 0.083); also the homotypic positive association between negative

Discussion

The inter-connection among psychopathological dimensions (i.e. SD, positive and negative symptoms) appears stronger at follow-up, and both SD and negative symptoms are more stable than positive symptoms. While from a clinical viewpoint it is intuitive that productive symptoms (such as hallucinations, delusions and agitation) are more sensitive to antipsychotic treatment than negative symptoms (e.g. apathy, avolition, anhedonia, or social withdrawal), it is noteworthy that subjective experiences

Conclusions

Taken together with converging literature (Parnas et al., 2011, Koren et al., 2013, Raballo et al., 2016) these results: a) underscore the psychopathological pivotal role of SD for symptom progression within the clinical schizophrenia spectrum; b) confirm that SD reflect an alteration in the basic psychological structure of schizophrenia that is associated with the longitudinal unfolding of positive and negative symptom dimensions; c) strengthen the rationale for an evaluation of SD as a

Role of funding source

This work was supported by the Onsager Fellowship programme in Psychopathology and Development from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). No funding agency influenced any aspect of the current work.

Contributors

Andrea Raballo and Antonio Preti jointly designed the study, performed the statistical analysis, interpreted the data and wrote the final manuscript.

Conflict of interest

There are no conflicts of interest concerning this article.

Acknowledgement

None.

References (10)

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