Symptoms
Research indicates that symptoms in childhood strongly predict disease in adulthood. In one long-term study, over 40% of people with schizophrenia who developed the disease in young adulthood had reported psychotic symptoms by age 11. For children with a family history of schizophrenia, the following inherited traits may be warning signs:
- Deficits in working (short-term) and verbal memory
- Impairments in gross motor skills (the child's ability to control different parts of the body)
- Attention deficits
- A decline in verbal memory, IQ, and other mental functions
Any signs of hallucinations or delusions must be differentiated from normal childhood fantasies.
Most often, early warning signs go unnoticed, and schizophrenia usually becomes evident for the first time in late adolescence or early adulthood. Schizophrenia that starts in childhood or adolescence tends to be severe. It should be strongly noted that the traits discussed above, even combinations of them, can be present without schizophrenia.
Negative Symptoms
A person with schizophrenia may have the following negative symptoms:
- Lack of self confidence
- Lack of emotions
- Colorless speaking tones
- Inappropriate reactions to events (such as laughing hysterically over a loss)
- A general loss of interest in life and the ability to experience pleasure
Lack of responsiveness and poor sociability often appear in childhood as the first indications of schizophrenia. Certain imaging techniques suggest that these findings are based on biologic changes in specific parts of the brain. In many patients, however, negative symptoms do not appear until after positive symptoms develop. Negative symptoms tend to be more common than positive symptoms in older patients and typically persist after positive symptoms have been treated.
Psychotic Symptoms
Psychotic symptoms, particularly delusions and hallucinations, are the most widely recognized manifestations of schizophrenia.
- Hallucinations. A hallucination is the experience of seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling, or feeling something that doesn't really exist. Auditory hallucinations are false senses of sound such as hearing voices that go unheard by others. They are the most common psychotic symptoms, affecting about 70% of patients.
- Delusions. A delusion is a fixed, false belief. It can be bizarre (such as invisible aliens have entered the room through an electric socket) or nonbizarre (such as unwarranted jealousy or the paranoid belief in being persecuted or watched).
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