Gender differences in the frequency of schizophrenic subtypes in unselected hospitalized patients

The phenotypic expression of the subtypes of schizophrenic disorders was studied in relationship to their relative frequency and the gender composition within each subtype using 374 successive DSM-III-R diagnosed schizophrenic patients. Two hundred and twenty-six of them were first admissions to a hospital. They were all diagnosed independently by three reviewers. While in the paranoid, the undifferentiated and the disorganized subtypes there was no significant difference between men and women, in the residual and the catatonic subtypes the frequency of men was more than three times greater than that of women. Among the 226 first admissions the frequency of the residual subtype was significantly lower than in the multiple admissions. The preponderance of male schizophrenic patients within the residual subtype indicates that they end up into this subtype, more frequently than women schizophrenic patients, whereas the greater preponderance of men in the catatonic subtype appears to reflect an intrinsic characteristic of this subtype.