[Clinico-statistical patterns in the dynamics of episodes in schizophrenia]

An examination of schizophrenics living in three regions of Moscow and suffering from the disease for over 15 years has shown that the change of the episode form is a probability process exhibiting a tendency to retention of the form of the preceding episode in the subsequent ones. At the same time it has been shown that this tendency is more marked, if the preceding episodes were of one and the same type. When the episode form changed principal trends of that process were revealed. The patients' sex was found to exert no substantial influence on the regularities discovered. The patients getting older, the frequency of depressive episodes became greater at the expense of transformation of depressive-paranoid symptoms into depressive ones.