Insight in stable schizophrenia: relations with psychopathology and cognition.

Objective: This study evaluated the relationship among insight, sociodemographic and clinical variables, symptoms and cognitive functions in a population of outpatients with stable schizophrenia, in order to identify possible contributing factors to awareness.
Method: Two-hundred and seventy-six consecutive outpatients with stable schizophrenia were enrolled in a cross-sectional study. All subjects were assessed by psychiatric scales and interview, and a wide neuropsychological battery. A factor analysis was performed to identify cognitive factors and multiple regression analyses were executed to test the contribution of variables considered to insight.
Results: Our results showed that positive and negative symptoms, executive functions, verbal memory-learning were contributors of awareness of mental illness; positive and negative symptoms explained variability in awareness of the need for treatment; positive symptoms and executive functions contributed to awareness of the social consequences of disorder.
Conclusions: These results suggested that insight was partially influenced by positive and negative symptoms and by cognitive functions. A complex system of overlapping variables may underlie impaired insight, contributing to a different extent to specific dimensions of poor insight in patients with stable schizophrenia.
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