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BACKGROUND: A variety of immunologic alterations have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. These findings have lent support to theories that autoimmune mechanisms may be important in some patients with the illness. The CD5+ B lymphocyte, a B-cell subset associated with autoimmune disease, has been the subject of two previously published studies yielding disparate results. METHODS: In this study, we used immunofluorescent flow cytometry to measure CD5+ B cells, total B and T cells, and CD4 and CD8 subsets in patients with schizophrenia and in normal control subjects. RESULTS: A significantly higher percentage of patients with schizophrenia, relative to normal control subjects, exhibited an elevated level of CD5+ B cells (27.6% vs 6.7%). Antipsychotic withdrawal had no effect on CD5+ B-cell levels, suggesting that medication effects were not the cause of this difference. No other studied lymphocyte subsets differed between the two groups. CONCLUSIONS: A subset of patients with schizophrenia have elevated levels of CD5+ B cells. This finding replicates an earlier study by another group and provides further evidence suggestive of autoimmune manifestations in schizophrenia.

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OBJECTIVE: Denial of physical illness and/or refusal of treatment are critical issues in the practice of medicine. A previous article proposed DSM-IV consider a new diagnosis for a subgroup of patients who refuse treatment, i.e., maladaptive denial of physical illness [1]. It is necessary to be able to use this form of denial as a diagnosis rather than invoke the term denial as merely a mental mechanism. This is a report of a prospective descriptive study of psychiatric consultations for medical inpatients who deny that they are ill or who refuse treatment. METHOD: In order to investigate the utility of this proposed diagnosis we conducted a one year study of all psychiatric consultations at a community hospital in Manhattan, New York. RESULTS: The diagnosis of maladaptive denial of physical illness was made in 2.5 percent of 317 psychiatric consultations. The patients did not fit into other DSM-III-R or DSM-IV categories. CONCLUSIONS: We suggest a clarification of the concept of denial for use with medically ill patients. The findings in this study demonstrate that the current categories in DSM-IV do not provide physicians with a diagnosis that describes this particular type of pathological denial of illness.

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BACKGROUND: The literature on insight, or self-awareness, in schizophrenia suggests that this cognitive dimension may be of nosological value. Poor insight has descriptive validity at the phenomenological and neuropsychological levels of schizophrenia and has prognostic validity in terms of the prediction of the course of illness. The lack of empirical data on the diagnostic specificity of poor insight to schizophrenia and the previous use of insight measures with questionable reliability and validity have limited this interpretation. METHODS: In the present study, we assessed insight into multiple aspects of mental disorder using a measure with demonstrated reliability and validity. A sample of 412 patients with psychotic and mood disorders coming from geographically diverse regions of the United States and one international site was studied. The main aims were to determine the prevalence of self-awareness deficits in patients in whom schizophrenia was diagnosed, to examine the relative severity of self-awareness deficits associated with schizophrenia compared with that of schizoaffective and mood disorders with and without psychosis, and to evaluate the clinical correlates of self-awareness in patients with schizophrenia. RESULTS: The results indicated that poor insight is a prevalent feature of schizophrenia. A variety of self-awareness deficits are more severe and pervasive in patients with schizophrenia than in patients with schizoaffective or major depressive disorders with or without psychosis and are associated with poorer psychosocial functioning. CONCLUSIONS: The results suggest that severe self-awareness deficits are a prevalent feature of schizophrenia, perhaps stemming from the neuropsychological dysfunction associated with the disorder, and are more common in schizophrenia than in other psychotic disorders.

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OBJECTIVE: It is frequently reported that patients with psychotic disorders have poor insight into their illness. Previous research has suggested that poor insight may have considerable power in predicting the long-term course of chronic mental disorders and an impact on patients' compliance with treatment plans. The authors, proposing that insight is best viewed as a multidimensional phenomenon, developed the Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder, which samples discrete and global aspects of insight across a variety of manifestations of illness. This article reports on a reliability and validity study of the scale. METHOD: The study subjects were 43 patients with schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder. Various aspects of insight into illness were evaluated with the scale. In addition, ratings of psychopathology, course of illness, and compliance with treatment were made. RESULTS: Item variability was high and normally distributed, supporting the authors' contention that insight can be rated on a continuous rather than dichotomous scale. Results of the analyses examining the relations between the various dimensions of insight assessed and the psychopathology, course, and compliance variables were generally as hypothesized. Convergent validity with other global measures of insight was found, and aspects of poor insight were correlated with poorer compliance and course of illness. Examination of the interrelations among the four insight subscales revealed that these subscales sample independent phenomena. CONCLUSIONS: The Scale to Assess Unawareness of Mental Disorder has good reliability and validity and has certain advantages over previous measures of insight, suggesting the usefulness of a multidimensional view of this complex concept.

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Immune mechanisms are thought to be important in a subpopulation of patients with schizophrenia. We examined the specificity of neural antibodies in patients with schizophrenia to identify a possible antigen. Serum antibodies from patients with schizophrenia and control subjects were tested for binding to protein extracts of human neuroblastoma cells by western blot. Protein antigens were characterised by aminoterminal and internal aminoacid sequence analysis. 14 of 32 (44%) otherwise healthy patients with schizophrenia had antibodies to a neuroblastoma protein of molecular weight 60 kDa. By partial sequence analysis, this protein was identified as the 60 kDa human heat-shock protein (hsp) that is the P1 mitochondrial protein, and which is 50% homologous to the mycobacterial 65 kDa hsp. Antigens that crossreact with hsp65 have been implicated in the pathogenesis of adjuvant-induced arthritis in rats and autoimmune diabetes in mice. Of 100 normal subjects or disease controls, antibodies to hsp60 were found in only 8 patients, all of whom had active infectious or inflammatory disease. Our results support the presence of abnormal immune reactivity involving hsp60 in a subset of patients with schizophrenia. The immune response may be related to the pathogenesis of the disease.

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This article reviews the literature on "poor insight" or unawareness of illness in schizophrenia. A large body of knowledge representing several different perspectives on insight has developed. This work can be divided into three broad categories, suggesting an important role for insight in the phenomenology, pathophysiology, and treatment of schizophrenia. The argument is made here that many of the self-awareness deficits observed in schizophrenia are of diagnostic significance, are neurally based, and are indispensable in guiding treatment decisions. In addition, this article proposes guidelines for assessing unawareness of illness in schizophrenia and discusses the relevance of such deficits to the diagnosis of schizophrenia.

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Denial of physical illness is a commonly encountered problem in consultation-liaison psychiatry. Although there is an extensive literature on denial, it has virtually ignored the diagnostic issues raised by the individual whose denial of physical illness is clearly maladaptive. The authors propose that DSM-IV include a subtype of adjustment disorder called "with maladaptive denial of physical disorder." They discuss this new category, its differential diagnosis, and the benefits to clinical practice of this proposed addition to diagnostic classification.

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