The Development of Questionnaire for Relapse Assessment in Psychotic Disorder / 신경정신의학

OBJECTIVES: The aims of this study were to develop an instrument for detection of relapse in psychotic disorder and to validate the instrument. METHODS: A total of 55 outpatients with psychotic disorder (schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, bipolar disorder) and 46 of their caregivers were enrolled. We developed the Questionnaire for Relapse Assessment in Psychotic disorder (QRAP), a self/report inventory. The patients and caregivers drew up the QRAP at two different time points, 'current' and 'the best state during the past three months'. In addition, we rated other established scales in order to evaluate psychotic and mood symptoms of patients. We divided patients into two groups, stable (n=30) and impending relapse (n=35) and evaluated the effectiveness of QRAP by calculating sensitivity and specificity. RESULTS: For all patients and caregivers, QRAP total score at 'current' was higher than 'the best state during the past three months' and showed significant positive correlation with other established scales. As expected, QRAP total score at 'current' in the impending relapse group was higher than that of the stable group. With cut off criteria 1, the QRAP demonstrated 80.0% sensitivity and 56.3% specificity in caregivers and effectively detected impending relapse. CONCLUSION: The results of our study suggest the effectiveness of QRAP as an instrument for detection of relapse in patients with psychotic disorder.

Age-Differences in Depressive Symptoms and Screening in Late Life

Depression is a common psychiatric disorder, but accurate recognition of depression is somewhat difficult because of different symptom presentation by age. The consequence of not recognizing to depression is that clinically significant and potentially treatable depression might be overlooked, misdiagnosed, and mistreated in depressive patients. The overlap of somatic symptoms of depression and physical illness and minimal expression of sadness is common in old age. Because of that reasons, alternative approach to identifying depression should be provided by proper screening instruments.

Recognition of Musical Nuance in Patients with Schizophrenia / 신경정신의학

OBJECTIVES: Emotion perception deficit has long been suggested to be one of the core features of schizophrenia. Although there have been several studies examining responses to facial expressions, few studies addressed music emotion recognition. The aim of this study was to examine the difference in emotion recognition in music between normal subjects and patients with schizophrenia. METHODS: Twenty pieces of music were presented to 43 patients with chronic schizophrenia and 82 healthy controls. The set of music consisted of ten pieces of sad music and ten pieces of cheerful music. The subjects were asked to answer whether each piece of music was sad or cheerful. RESULTS: The correct response rate of music emotion recognition was lower in patients with schizophrenia compared with that in healthy controls (76.67+/-19.03% vs. 93.54+/-8.18%, p<0.001). When subgroup analyses was done by type of music ('sad' or 'cheerful'), patients showed a significantly lower correct response rate in recognizing both sad and cheerful emotion in music than healthy controls (sad emotion : 65.12+/-31.15% vs. 91.95+/-15.27%, cheerful emotion : 88.0+/-16.83% vs. 95.12+/-8.64%). The significant correlations between the clinical symptom severity of schizophrenia and music emotion recognition were not found to be. CONCLUSION: The results suggest that patients with schizophrenia might have difficulties in recognizing musical nuances.