Difficulties in functional recovery in schizophrenia: negative and cognitive symptoms.

Schizophrenia remains the major psychiatric disorder with the most debilitating effects, for which psychopharmacological treatment is only capable of a partial recovery from the total symptomatic dimensions. The clinical evolution and prognosis of these patients are still discouraging. Although are less disruptive for families and society, negative and cognitive symptoms heavily precede the psychotic onset of schizophrenia and have the tendency to persist even after the remission of the disease’s positive symptoms, sometimes considered as a state of psychic defect. These two symptomatic dimensions have the highest share in influencing disability and in the reduction of the autonomy degree of these patients. In the last decades, other cerebral neurotransmission pathways have been identified, and their dysfunction are supposed to underpin the negative and cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia. Highlighting the contribution of cholinergic, glutamatergic and serotonergic receptors, along with the role of other dopaminergic receptors besides those previously known have generated hope for the development of a new psychotropic class that can specifically target these types of symptoms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]