Premorbid adjustment and affective symptomatology in schizophrenia

Because affective symptomatology and premorbid adjustment are both strongly associated with outcome in schizophrenia, recent investigators have suggested that these two variables may be related to one another. In order to test this hypothesis, 45 schizophrenics were interviewed and rated on standardized and reliable measures of affective symptomatology and premorbid adjustment. The results indicated that schizophrenics with concurrent affective syndromes did not differ from nonaffective schizophrenics on several indices of premorbid adjustment. In addition, only one of 22 affective signs and symptoms, depression, was significantly related to premorbid adjustment. These findings suggest that the good-poor premorbid dimension and the schizoaffective-schizophrenic distinction are largely independent, and that future prognostic studies should include measures of both variables in order to determine their relative and pooled predictive power.