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Schizophrenia: positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms

Published on June 30, 2026   18 min

A selection of talks on Neuroscience

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0:00
Hello, everybody. My name is Merete Nordentoft. I'm a Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Copenhagen and affiliated with the mental health services in the capital region of Denmark. The title of my talk today is Schizophrenia: Positive, Negative, and Cognitive Symptoms.
0:21
The first slide I'll show you is a study we did where we followed a large cohort of people with first episode psychosis for 20 years. What is shown on this slide is a figure that was published in World Psychiatry in 2023. It is about how symptoms develop over time. What you can see is that among people with first episode psychosis, the pale blue line shows that there's a large group who actually have an early remission of psychotic symptoms. But we can also see that there are two groups at the top of this figure who have more or less continuous severe psychotic symptoms during all these 20 years. The worst you can get on this scale is five. It's a combination of hallucinations and delusions, and each of these subscales goes up to five. So if you get four, it does mean that it is very severe. There's a group who has the symptoms all through the 20-year period, but also a large group who actually experience a remission.
1:28
We've also looked at the negative symptom trajectories and when we analyze those data, we found only two trajectories. This one with continuous negative symptoms and it's approximately 49%. Half of the patients had continuous negative symptoms and half of them had remission of negative symptoms. Negative symptoms were associated with a much worse outcome. We did a large study

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Schizophrenia: positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms

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