Dementia in Severe Schizophrenia - PubMed

6 hours ago

Dementia develops 4- to 20-fold more frequently in individuals with schizophrenia than in the general population.
The study characterized cognitive, clinical, and genetic features of dementia in severe, extremely treatment-resistant schizophrenia (SETRS).
In a cohort of 155 individuals with SETRS, 98.7% scored below the mild cognitive impairment cutoff, and 47.1% scored below the severe dementia cutoff.
The cognitive profile of SETRS differed from Alzheimer's disease and frontotemporal dementia but paralleled community-dwelling schizophrenia.
No pathogenic variants in mendelian dementia genes were found, and APOE4 allele frequency was lower in SETRS compared to Alzheimer's disease and Lewy body dementia.
Cognitive impairment was not attributed to premorbid intellectual disability, poor effort, medications, cardiometabolic risk, or institutionalization.
Commonly proposed explanations for schizophrenia dementia, like comorbid Alzheimer's or cardiovascular risk, were not viable in this study.

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