Schizophrenia can lead to dementia

Many individuals who develop symptoms of schizophrenia when they are 50 years of age or older exhibit a rapid decline into dementia. However, the symptoms of older schizophrenic patients who do not develop this rapid decline in their mental capacities, actually improve over time. Schizophrenia is a severe brain disorder that alters a person's emotions, thought processes and perceptions of reality. Symptoms can include apathy, hallucinations and delusions. Most of the time, symptoms of the disorder surface during the late teens and 20s. And while most patients with schizophrenia have some difficulty with memory and intellectual functioning, these mental deficits are usually stable over time. A small proportion of patients with schizophrenia don't develop symptoms until late adulthood, and this type of schizophrenia is not as well understood as the typical form.Researchers form the Prince of Wales Hospital, Sydney, studied 27 patients with late-onset schizophrenia and 34 healthy subjects. Average age of both groups was around 70 years. During the first year of the study, there was no evidence of cognitive decline in either group. But after five years, approximately half of the schizophrenic patients, but none of the control subjects, had been diagnosed with dementia. Five of the 19 schizophrenic individuals who were still in the study were diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, one with dementia due to stroke, and three with other kinds of dementia.

The researchers also found that among individuals who did not develop dementia, their schizophrenia seemed to resolve at least partially, sometimes altogether, after five years. They hope to find out why some late-onset schizophrenia patients decline so rapidly by looking at possible genetic causes, conducting more neuropsychiatric testing, and looking at patients' brain scans.