양성 및 음성 정신분열병환자의 신경심리학적 특징에 관한 비교연구

A Comparative Study o f the Neuropsychological Characteristics Between the Positive and Negative Schizophrenia

The authors have studied chronic schizophrenics in terms of dichotomous, subtypal classification into both the positive and negative schizophrenia, taking into the consideration that those subtypes of schizophrenia have been reported to be different from each other in the areas of the neuropsychological characteristics, psychopathology and other clinical characteristics in many studies so far, and that those differences might bear an important implication that the negative schizophrenia is etiologically or pathogenetically distinct from the positive schizophrenia and possibly, the negative schizophrenia might have something to do with the cognitive and social developmental failure in the early premorbid period. The results are as follows. This study reconfirmed the clinical characteristics of the positive schizophrenia identified as the schizophrenics predominantly with delusion, hallucination and affective lability, while the negative schizophrenia as with the distinct obtundation of emotional expression and affect and the social withdrawal. The cognitive function of the chronic schizophrenics, whether the positive or negative, showed gross impairment in the area of the immediate recall and remote memory, recognition vocabulary funtion, short-term recall of the visual and auditory stimuli, and verbal language generation compared to normal control subjects. The negative schizophrenics showed significantly more impairment than positive schizophrenics did in the short-term recall of auditory stimuli, even though they were given almost half the daily dosage of the neuroleptics given to the positive schizophrenics. The extrapyramidal side effects, age, education were not significantly different between the positive and negative schizophrenics. We could not demonstrate organicity or neurological dysfunction that were specitic to the negative schizophrenics in this study. However we came out with strong sense that further research in this area is needed with better control of other variables like drugs, antimuscarinic activity in the blood, intellectual capacity and demographic backgrounds etc.