A relação entre sintomas negativos e cognição social na esquizofrenia

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric condition that causes many disabilities and affects around 1% of the worlds population. Patients present a wide range of functional and social deficits that disturb their daily life and worsen their life quality. Negative symptoms and social cognition deficits are amongst the factors that have been considered as possible contributors for this decrease in patients functional outcome. These two aspects of the disease share many characteristics, such as the persistence along different phases of the illness and resistance to traditional pharmacological treatments. Nevertheless, the length and nature of the relationship between schizophrenias negative symptoms and social cognitive deficits are still not well established. In this work, a systematic literature review was made to verify the already established knowledge about the associations between severity of negative symptoms and social cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia and associated disorders. The results show moderate connections between social cognition and negative symptoms. These connections, however, vary according to the social cognition domain evaluated and also according to sample characteristics, suggesting that, in the future, researches may benefit from more standardized methodologies.