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Children with a schizophrenic disorder: neurobehavioral studies
R F Asarnow1, W Brown, R Strandburg
1Department of Psychiatry, University of California, Los Angeles 90024, USA.
Insights
Schizophrenic children often exhibit early developmental delays in language and motor skills. These delays may stem from limited information-processing capacity, impacting skill automation.
Area of Science:
- Childhood Neuropsychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Psychiatric Research
Background:
- Schizophrenia in children presents unique developmental challenges.
- Early childhood neurobehavioral deficits are often observed in children who later develop schizophrenia.
Purpose of the Study:
- To summarize findings from retrospective and cross-sectional neurobehavioral studies on children with schizophrenia.
- To investigate the nature of early developmental delays and their relation to information processing.
Main Methods:
- Review of retrospective studies on early childhood behavior in schizophrenic children.
- Analysis of cross-sectional studies on older children with schizophrenia (≥10 years).
- Examination of behavioral, cognitive, neuropsychological, and event-related potential data.
Main Results:
- Retrospective studies indicate early language and visual-motor coordination delays in children later diagnosed with schizophrenia.
- Cross-sectional studies in older children do not consistently show these specific deficits, suggesting developmental delays.
- Evidence points to limitations in information-processing resources in children with schizophrenia.
Conclusions:
- Developmental delays in schizophrenic children may be linked to the time required to automate skills.
- Limited information-processing capacity appears to underlie these observed delays.
- Findings suggest a neurodevelopmental basis for early deficits in childhood schizophrenia.
Abstract:
This paper summarizes retrospective and cross-sectional neurobehavioral studies of schizophrenic children. Retrospective studies of schizophrenic children reveal that during early childhood, prior to the first onset of schizophrenic symptoms, most schizophrenic children showed delays in language acquisition and/or impairments and delays in visual-motor coordination. These impairments appear to be developmental delays rather than fixed neurobehavioral impairments, because cross-sectional studies conducted when the children are at least 10 years of age, after the first onset of psychosis, fail to detect the same deficits. The results of behavioral, cognitive/neuropsychological studies as well as the study of event-related potentials measured during performance of cognitive tasks suggests that schizophrenic children suffer from limitations in processing resources. It is argued that the developmental delays observed in schizophrenic children represent the greater time it takes them to automate certain skills. The delay in automation may reflect their limited information-processing capacity.