Many people with schizophrenia have stable cognition over 20 years: Study

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My cognition is not bad but negative symptoms are very bad

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i dont think im one of the many…i feel like i prob lost 20 iq points. and my memory just gets worse and worse

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@everhopeful you’ve read more articles on sz than the leading scientists I bet by now haha :smile: thanks for the post :pray:

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In the Discussion section the authors mention possible limitations of their study:

Our study detected higher attrition at the 20-year follow-up of patients with poor cognitive function at the 10-year follow-up. Patients seemed likelier to participate in the 20-year reassessment if they had good cognitive function, especially in older patients, as they mainly belong to the continued stable or improving cognition groups. This indicates that cognitive decline might prevent participation in our follow-up because only those with a decline from high cognitive function are represented in the sample. It is possible and very worrisome that cognitive decline later during illness has been overlooked because of a systematic failure to include the most affected patients in follow-up assessments. The Suffolk County 20-year follow-up had a remarkably low drop-out rate, and they are the only large longitudinal study to show consistent and significant cognitive decline in their patient population. (Jonas et al., Reference Jonas, Lian, Callahan, Ruggero, Clouston, Reichenberg and Kotov2022). We found that 30% of patients experienced cognitive decline, and our findings may underestimate the rates of patients with cognitive decline in a real-world schizophrenia population.

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May I ask? Because my EN here is not perfect,

So they say, that if a person is socially communicative, it means there’s a smaller or zero cognitive decline? Am I right?

Because cognitive things are very connected to social skills?

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In my view, this is a poorly done study, because those with the worst course of disease were most likely “lost to follow-up”, that is, they were simply not included. Thus, the study does not reflect the real-world situation.

Kudos to the Danes for having an early-intervention program (OPUS) but sadly this study does not seem too good – the headline in the news confused me.

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