Schizophrenia Experiment: Case Study

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Harvey, Moriarty, Friedman, White, Parrella, Mohs and Davids (2000) conducted a study to analyze the preservation of cognitive functions in geriatric patients with lifelong schizophrenia in the hopes of discovering the success rate of long term institutionalization. The overall objective was of the study consisted of obtaining enough data to compare the scores on numerous cognitive skill tasks from the geriatric schizophrenia population and a population of healthy elderly individuals. Their experimental group consisted of 165 volunteers and they were matched one-to-one with an individual from the control group based on same age and education. The symptoms of schizophrenia were examined with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale; PANSS. It contains thirty items with seven items rating positive symptoms, seven rating negative symptoms and sixteen items assessing their general psychopathology. The total scores obtained on the positive and negative subscales were used as dependant variables in this study. Harvey et al (2000) also used the word list learning and delayed recall, pranix drawing, modified Boston Naming test and CERAD to assess cognitive function of both their control and experimental populations. The word list learning and delayed recall is a ten item list of words that is presented to the subject during three separate trials. After each trial the subject is asked to freely recall the words from the list. After a delay, which is filled with the pranix drawing task, the participants are asked to recall the list of words once again. The dependent variable in this task is the number of words recalled over the three trials and the number of words that were recalled after the delay. The scores ranged from 0 to 20 based the... ... middle of paper ... ...ric illnesses into old age. The results from study demonstrated that those in the experimental group showed lower cognitive functioning than those of the control group which opens the door for further research into why this trend appeared. Basically, the knowledge I am taking away from this study is that for undetermined reason, older individuals who have suffered from schizophrenia for most of their life are not as highly functioning in terms of cognition as those who did not suffer from schizophrenia. Works Cited Harvey, P. D., Moriarty, P. J., Friedman, J. I., White, L., Parrella, M., Mohs, R. C., & Davis, K. L. (2000). Differential preservation of cognitive functions in geriatric patients with lifelong chronic schizophrenia: Less impairment in reading compared with other skill areas. Biological Psychiatry, 47(11), 962-968. doi:10.1016/S0006-3223(00)00245-6

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