[Cognitive aging in chronic psychotic patients]

The cognitive aging of psychotic patients is still poorly apprehended and sometimes wrongly compared with demential or pseudo-demential deterioration. We studied the impact of chronic psychosis on cognitive performance in the elderly.

We estimated cognitive performance in two groups of 15 patients each among persons on old-age pensions or living in geriatric nursing homes. One group included patients who had already showed dissociative or non-dissociative chronic psychosis and the other group persons with no previous psychotic signs. Cognitive estimations were made on the basis of Folstein's Mini Mental State (MMS) score and Signoret's Battery of Cognitive Efficacy (BEC 96). Results obtained in the two groups were compared with the Mann and Whitney non-parametric test.

The psychiatric patients showed a significant deficiency compared with the others for memory and executive functions and also a much broader range of scores on the BEC96 that demonstrated deficiency among the psychiatric patients.

Though these findings must be interpreted with caution, they do demonstrate a trend similar to that observed in young schizophrenics and also to that of the cognitive performances observed in older schizophrenics and demented subjects. Patients with dissociated or non-dissociated psychotic disorders show an apparent relative cognitive deficiency irrespective of age. The psychotic elderly appear to exhibit a cognitive clash much more than a simple pseudo-demential deficiency.