This Article  • References  • Full text PDF  • Reply to article  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citation map  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in this journal  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

Fred Schwartz, PhD; Kenneth G. Terkelsen, MD; Thomas E. Smith, MD
The New York Hospital-Cornell Medical Center Westchester Division 21 Bloomingdale Rd White Plains, NY 10605

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 1992;49(6):502.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.—

Breier et al¹.recently reported deterioration in chronic schizophrenic patients followed up for an average of 6 years after admission to a National Institute of Mental Health research ward. The patients were more symptomatic on followup, and 78% had had a psychotic relapse during the follow-up period. We believe that methodologic problems limiting interpretation of these findings should have been subjected to greater scrutiny, as this study could be employed to shape policy regarding allocation of increasingly scarce and expensive public resources for the treatment of schizophrenia.

First, the authors are inconsistent in their approach to the impact of sampling bias on generalizability of their findings. Nearly all patients were referred from community-based inpatient and outpatient facilities "for improvement of symptom control and functional capacity" because they still had "residual positive and negative symptoms." Elsewhere, the authors describe these patients as having illnesses that continued "without remission" . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?