Schizophrenia, cognition, and aging: cognitive deficits and the relationship between test performance and aging

ABSTRACT

Most measures of cognitive function decline with age during adulthood. Research indicates that people with schizophrenia experience considerable cognitive deficits. These deficits appear to become more troublesome with increasing age, but this has been debated. The aim of this research was to better understand the age related cognitive deficits of Icelandic subjects with schizophrenia in comparison to healthy individuals. Cognition of individuals 18 to 64 years of age was evaluated with 10 neuropsychological tests. People with schizophrenia performed significantly worse on all tests, as expected, indicating widespread cognitive deficits compared to healthy individuals, independent of age. Furthermore, the results suggest that people with schizophrenia follow a similar age-related trajectory of cognitive decline as healthy individuals. Overall, we conclude that the cognitive difficulties often experienced by older people with schizophrenia are better explained by lower cognitive function at the time of diagnosis than by faster cognitive decline with increasing age.

KEYWORDS:

• Schizophrenia
• cognitive deficits
• neuropsychological tests
• aging

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the European Union, Seventh Framework Program (Project PsychCNVs) grant number (FP/2007-2013) and Landspitali Innovation Program 2014.