In the 1980s, there was widespread overdiagnosis of schizophrenia

In the 1980s, there was widespread overdiagnosis of schizophrenia in China14,15; many patients who Navitoclax concentration Western clinicians would consider as suffering from affective disorders were diagnosed as schizophrenic by their Chinese

counterparts. In the 1990s, the widespread promulgation of the formal Chinese diagnostic system largely eliminated this problem,16 though it still occurs among poorly trained psychiatrists in smaller hospitals. Despite the differences in the formal criteria, almost all patients diagnosed by well-trained psychiatrists as suffering from schizophrenia in China today would be readily identifiable as suffering from schizophrenia Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical by Western clinicians. Symptomatology One important question is the extent to which cultural factors mold the expression of biologically based mental disorders such as schizophrenia. Chinese clinicians did not focus much attention on schizophrenic patients’ Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical negative symptoms until the late 1980s and have only recently started to pay attention to cognitive symptoms. Assessment of Chinese inpatients’ symptoms17 has found that negative symptoms are largely independent

of positive Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical symptoms and that the interrelationship of positive and negative symptoms is quite similar to that reported for Western patients. About 80% of Chinese patients acutely admitted to psychiatric hospitals have full remission of both positive

and negative symptoms during the standard 3-month admission.18 There is little research yet available on cognitive symptoms Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical in Chinese schizophrenic patients, but the available studies19 suggest that the cognitive deficits among Chinese patients are similar to those among Western patients. This does not, however, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical mean that culture plays no role in the patterning of symptoms in schizophrenia. The content of the delusions experienced by schizophrenic patients in China has changed over time in parallel with social changes.20,21 Moreover, detailed assessment of 448 schizophrenic patients at admission PDK4 using a Chinese version of the Scale for Assessment of Positive Symptoms22,23 found that Chinese patients are more likely than their Western counterparts to experience erotomanic delusions (9.4%) and delusions of control (20.8%), and are less likely to experience thought broadcasting (7.4%), thought withdrawal (5.1%), and thought insertion (4.5%). These Chinese findings should be considered in the ongoing debates about the diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia: given the effect of cultural factors on the content of delusions and the difficulty of assessing the “bizarreness” of delusions cross-culturally, the wisdom of assigning greater diagnostic significance to bizarre versus nonbizarre delusions – as is done in DSM-IV – is in doubt.

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