Cognitive performance of long-term institutionalized elderly patients with schizophrenia: A case control study

Cognitive impairment is inherent to the ageing process. Several studies suggest that patients with late-life schizophrenia have more marked cognitive impairment. Objective The aim of this study was to compare the cognitive performance of elderly institutionalized patients with schizophrenia and institutionalized elderly control patients without neurological or psychiatric diseases, matched for age, educational level and institutionalization time. Methods The Cambridge Examination for Mental Disorders of the Elderly (CAMCOG) was used to test 10 institutionalized elderly patients with schizophrenia. Results were compared with those of 10 institutionalized control patients with history of Hansen's disease. Results Patients with schizophrenia showed a worse performance in terms of total CAMCOG score and on its subtests of orientation, language, abstraction, and memory (p≤0.05). Patients with schizophrenia also disclosed a non-significant trend toward lower scores on the MMSE and on calculus. Conclusion Findings demonstrated that schizophrenia was associated to worse cognitive impairment in long-term institutionalized elderly patients compared with institutionalized patients without neurological or psychiatric diseases.