Overview

Schizophrenia is a chronic and the most debilitating neuropsychiatric illness, which affects around 2.7% of the world's population. Such neuropsychiatric diseases impart considerable impacts on the social lives of the affected people as it hampers cognition, thinking ability, speech, emotions, perception, and behavior. Schizophrenia progresses early in childhood with the appearance of subtle cognitive, social, and motor deficits which is followed by the advent of anxiety, social withdrawal, and low mood in early adulthood. This then leads to the appearance of prodromal symptoms of psychosis, consequently progressing to the onset of the first psychotic episode. The heterogeneous combination of symptoms observed in the patients makes the diagnosis and treatment problematic, leading to longer periods of remission and increased relapse rates. The heterogeneity is also clearly depicted in the gender differences, with a higher incidence of the disease in men as compared to women. Men tend to get Schizophrenia at an early age and with more severe symptoms than women. The modal age of onset is between 18 and 25 for men and between 25 and 35 for women. Early age of onset and occurrence of more negative symptoms in men are other such varied manifestations of the disease. Furthermore, the occurrence of more affective symptoms, better pre-morbid and social functioning, and better remission and lower relapse rates are observed in women. Schizophrenia thus remains a multifactorial neurodevelopmental disorder, the etiology of which remains contentious.

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