The mental states of 23 epileptic psychotic patients and 10 patients with process schizophrenia were compared, using the Present State Examination. The epileptics displayed marked heterogeneity of psychiatric diagnoses. Disturbances of affect underlying the psychosis or presenting as manic-depressive psychosis were frequent and independent of the type of epilepsy. Schizophrenic psychosis, classified with psychopathological criteria similar to those used in the non-epileptic schizophrenic group, was significantly associated with temporal lobe epilepsy. Psychoses other than schizophrenia, however, were present in 5 out of 16 patients with temporal lobe epilepsy. These results support a relationship between schizophrenic symptoms and temporal lobe pathology and emphasize the need to use reproducible methods of diagnosis in psychiatric research.

Data are presented on 24 patients with epilepsy and psychosis whose clinical presentation was rated using the Present State Examination (PSE). Seventeen had complex partial seizures and a diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy, seven had generalised epilepsy. An association between a CATEGO category of nuclear schizophrenia (NS) and a lesion of the left side was noted. No clear link between depressive symptoms and a right-sided focus was discovered. Affective disorders were noted in both groups of epileptic patients, although paranoid psychoses were commoner in the temporal lobe group. There was also a tendency for the latter to have more delusions of persecution, ideas of reference, and special features of depression. The group rated as NS appear less likely to show evidence of intellectual deterioration than the other psychotic patients; in addition, the interval between the onset of their epilepsy and the onset of their psychosis is shorter. Radiological assessment by CAT reveals few differences between groups, but the psychotic samples do show higher than expected values on a number of variables, in particular the bilateral septum-caudate distance and the size of the third and fourth ventricle.

Although negative symptoms were traditionally considered to be unresponsive to neuroleptic medication, recent studies have demonstrated that negative symptoms do improve during neuroleptic treatment and that such improvement tends to occur concurrently with improvement in positive symptoms. Clozapine is an atypical neuroleptic that is effective in a significant proportion of otherwise neuroleptic-nonresponsive schizophrenic patients; in contrast to conventional neuroleptics, clozapine is also purported to possess unique efficacy in the amelioration of negative symptoms. How clozapine-associated reduction in negative symptoms relates to change in positive symptoms is not clear. To study the relationship between change in positive and negative symptoms during clozapine treatment, we monitored symptomatology in 40 DSM-III-R schizophrenic patients before and about 8 weeks after a trial of clozapine. Both positive and negative symptoms improved significantly. There was a significant correlation (r = .63, p c.01) between change in positive symptoms and change in negative symptoms; as with conventional neuroleptics, negative symptoms improved concomitantly with positive symptoms during clozapine treatment. Clozapine's apparent greater efficacy on negative symptoms may be related to its greater efficacy on positive symptoms in otherwise neuroleptic-refractory patients and its lesser propensity to cause extrapyramidal sideeffects.

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