A joint research group of Toho University, Hokkaido University, Tokyo University, National Center of Neurology and Psychiatry, etc. reveals awareness of "social cognition" in schizophrenia patients and subjective difficulty in real life I made it.
Difficulties in social life have been observed in many patients with schizophrenia, and it has been pointed out that a decline in "social cognition" is one of the main factors.Social cognition includes the ability to read emotions from the other person's face and voice, and the ability to infer the other person's intentions, and is considered to be the basic ability of interpersonal relationships.
However, it has not been clarified how schizophrenic patients perceive social cognition in real life.Therefore, this time, we conducted a questionnaire survey on the Internet for the purpose of clarifying this.
Analyzing the responses of 232 schizophrenic patients and 494 healthy controls, 23.0% of schizophrenic patients and 24.5% of healthy controls knew the term "social cognition." ..In addition, while the number of people who have been treated for social cognition is very small, 3.9% for schizophrenia patients and 0.8% for healthy controls, "social cognition is related to social life". The number of patients with schizophrenia was 64.8%, and that of healthy controls was 51.2%.
Patients with schizophrenia felt a stronger sense of difficulty in social cognition than healthy controls, and it was also found that the stronger the sense of difficulty, the lower the function in social life such as school employment and interpersonal relationships. ..
From the results of this survey, patients with schizophrenia have a strong sense of difficulty in social cognition, and although they recognize that it is related to social life, the word social cognition itself and recognition have not spread, and social cognition It was also suggested that measuring ability and receiving treatment were not widespread.In other words, efforts to improve social cognition in schizophrenia patients are considered to be unmet medical needs (treatment that is in demand but not yet sufficiently provided) in the treatment of schizophrenia.
This is a result showing that the development of effective treatments for social cognition and the examination for their dissemination are important issues.