The NIMH-MATRICS Consensus Statement on Negative Symptoms

The Evolution of Drug Development in Schizophrenia: Past Issues and Future Opportunities

“…Here too, animal and human models will be facilitated by currently evolving constructs and measurement. A consensus view, developed in a National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) workshop, proposes anhedonia, blunted affect, alogia, avolition, and asociality as components of this construct (Kirkpatrick et al, 2006).…”

“…Impaired cognition and negative symptom pathology remain unmet treatment needs, and substantially account for long-term morbidity, and poor functional outcomes associated with this disease (Buchanan et al, 2005;Green et al, 2004;Kirkpatrick et al, 2000Kirkpatrick et al, , 2006Matza et al, 2006).…”

Health related quality of life in patients having schizophrenia negative symptoms – a systematic review

“…Thus, targeting SNS in the treatment of schizophrenia may result in significant functional benefits [32]. Evaluation of SNS is still facing major limitations, such as heterogeneity of symptom definitions, even after the consensus statement from 2006 [3]. Furthermore, an assessment of a patient with SNS may be affected by co-occurrence of positive symptoms, such as hallucinations and difficulties in communication, like alogia and affective flattening [1].…”

“…SNS are also classified as prominent, predominant and/or persistent depending on severity (Table 1). Patients with SNS lose the normal functioning that they had prior to the onset of their illness [2,3]. …”

“…SNS are associated with a limited response to pharmacotherapies and poor functional outcomes, thus, remain an area of unmet therapeutic need [3,4]. Reports from the literature show that 40% of patients with schizophrenia have SNS during the first psychosis episode [5] while 20% to 30% of patients suffer from persistent SNS [6,7].…”