Schizophrenia personality profile explored

Schizophrenia personality profile explored


MedWire News: Schizophrenia patients have a unique personality profile that is present across cultures, with male patients seemingly undergoing the greatest degree of personality change, Japanese study findings suggest.
While the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI), a self-report questionnaire covering four temperament and three character domains, is well-established, it has rarely been used in schizophrenia patients and never in Japan.
Hiroshi Kunugi, from the National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry in Tokyo, and colleagues administered the TCI and the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) to 86 Japanese schizophrenia patients and 115 age- and gender-matched Japanese controls.
Of the patients, 33 were female, as were 44 controls. The average age of male and female patients was 41.5 years and 41.9 years, respectively, compared with 41.2 years and 41.6 years for male and female controls, respectively. Patients had significantly fewer years in education than controls, at 13.6 years versus 17.3 years for males, and 13.1 years versus 14.4 years for females.
Average total PANSS score was 62.8 for male patients and 64.8 for female patients. On the TCI, patients had significantly lower scores than controls on the novelty seeking, reward dependence, self-directedness, and cooperativeness subscales, at 17.4 versus 20.6, 13.6 versus 15.2, 23.6 versus 30.1 and 26.7 versus 28.5, respectively.
Patients also had significantly higher scores than controls on the TCI harm avoidance and self-transcendence subscales, at 22.7 versus 16.9 and 13.8 versus 10.9, respectively. Only on the persistence subscale were the scores not significantly different.
Male patients had significantly higher harm avoidance and significantly lower self-directedness and cooperative subscale scores than female patients. In addition, male, but not female, patients had significantly different scores from controls on the reward dependence and cooperativeness subscales.
Both male and female patients had significantly different scores on novelty seeking, harm avoidance, self-directedness, and self-transcendence subscales than controls. There was moderate correlation between TCI and symptom dimensions on the PANSS.
"The present findings indicate that patients with chronic schizophrenia have pervasively altered personality profile as measured by TCI which is in line with previous studies, and male patients may undergo even more pronounced personality alteration than female patients when both of them are compared to healthy people," the team concludes in the journal Psychiatry Research.

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