Symptom-oriented versus syndrome approaches to resolving heterogeneity of neuropsychological functioning in schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a heterogeneous disorder. The syndrome and the symptom-oriented approaches are two methods that have been used to examine differences in psychopathological processes across different patients with schizophrenia. The authors indirectly compared these two approaches in their examination of associations between positive symptoms and neuropsychological performance. Positive syndrome and delusion and hallucination severity scores were compared in respective associations to functioning on 12 neuropsychological variables in 73 stable outpatients with schizophrenia. The individual symptoms of the positive syndrome were associated with relatively distinct patterns of neuropsychological performance, suggesting that the symptom-oriented approach was more sensitive.