Schizophrenia: Symptoms, Diagnosis And Treatment

The sad news on this context is: No tests, either lab-oriented or physical, can predict or diagnose absolutely an attack of schizophrenia; it's mostly through certain standardized clinical symptoms that schizophrenia is detected in an individual. Physical tests are only good for ruling out conditions similar to schizophrenia and that include seizure and metabolic disorders, thyroid dysfunctions, brain tumors or substance-induced psychosis. However, advancing medical science has opened up a lot of avenues of late; today, certain blood tests, IQ tests, eye-tracking and brain imaging are providing much hope in the diagnosis of this disorder.

The tests consider all the positive, negative and cognitive elements of schizophrenia combined; thus hallucinations, delusions and racing thoughts are compared to the levels of apathy, indifference and unsocial behaviour in the patients and tallied with the cognitive skills bound by disorganized thoughts, concentration difficulties, failures in understanding and executing instructions and memory failures.

An initial treatment for schizophrenia depends a lot on a quick diagnosis; the sooner the symptoms are diagnosed, better is the chance of a patient to get treated and cured for a long-term outcome. Many a pharmaceutical companies today offer PAP-s or Patient Assistance Programs that are specifically meant for people not covered by even affordable health insurance or drug benefits to obtain medications at nil/nominal costs. However, since a lot of people are ignorant on the PAP-s, the best treatments they receive are with the regular drugs meant to treat behavioral problems and general psychosis. Not that they fail to show results, but they are temporary at best and worsen if the patient also has some amount of dementia, leading to a worsening of mental decline. This particularly applies to the tranquilizers (neuroleptic agents; e.g. chlorpromazine, thioridazine, haloperidol etc.) imparting a calming effect; patients with dementia have been found to worsen at double the rate of usual decline than normal, especially, those suffering as well from Alzheimer's disease. The fact, however, received little attention and it can't be said that if the hush-up involved a lot of money from the pharmaceutical companies.

But the recent times also saw one Dr. Henry A. Nasrallah (Professor of Psychiatry, Neurology and Neuroscience, Director of the Schizophrenia Program; University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, Ohio) holding the test named: ‘Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness' in an attempt to prove older anti-psychotic formulations to be as good any other emerging treatments for schizophrenia. Whether the studies could show schizophrenia treatment measures in bright lights or not is a different question, but has definitely generated a lot of confusion.

The study, we may say, is a battle between typical anti-psychotics (FGA or first-generation anti-psychotics) and atypical anti-psychotics (SGA or second generation anti-psychotics). The logic Dr. Nasrallah used is: The typical stuff combats defiance of other medications and repeating psychotic relapses, which prove worse than the disease itself.

But it is also a truth that FGA-s, despite showing less number of relapses in patients, do nothing to improve mental functioning unlike SGA-s; however, a different result could be achieved if the subjects were not the patients that already underwent multiple relapses and developed the disorder in a more severe form.