van Rooijen G, et al. - This study's aims were to construct a network of positive, negative and depressive symptoms in male patients with schizophrenia to investigate interactions between individual symptoms, and identify the most central symptoms within this network as well as examine group-level differences in network connectivity between remitted and non–remitted patients. Based on the results of the present study, clinical symptoms of schizophrenia were connected in a stable way, independent of symptomatic remission while the number of connections seems to be dependent on remission status.

Methods

• For this purpose, a network of depressive, positive and negative symptoms were computed in a sample of four hundread seventy male patients diagnosed with a psychotic disorder.
• After that, depressive symptoms were evaluated with the Calgary Depression Rating Scale for Schizophrenia, while psychotic symptoms were surveyed with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale.
• Finally, networks of male patients who fulfilled remission criteria (Andreasen et al., 2005) and non–remitters for psychosis were compared.

Results

• The study findings suggested that depressive symptoms were mostly related to suicidality and could act as moderator between psychotic symptoms and suicidality.
• It was observed in the findings that ‘depressed mood’, ‘observed depression’, ‘poor rapport’, ‘stereotyped thinking’ and ‘delusions’ were central symptoms within the network.
• In spite of the fact that remitted male patients had a similar network structure compared to non-remitters the networks varied significantly in terms of global strength.