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Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access originally published online on November 8, 2006
Schizophrenia Bulletin 2007 33(4):1038-1053; doi:10.1093/schbul/sbl051
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© The Author 2006. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.

Psychomotor Slowing in Schizophrenia

Manuel Morrens1,2, Wouter Hulstijn2,3 and Bernard Sabbe2,4
2 Collaborative Antwerp Psychiatric Research Institute, Building A, Campus Drie Eiken, Universiteitsplein 1, B-2610 Antwerp, Belgium
3 Nijmegen Institute for Cognition and Information, Nijmegen, The Netherlands
4 St Norbertus Hospital, Duffel, Belgium

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 0032-(0)-3/820-24-02, fax: 0032-(0)-3/820-24-14, e-mail: mmorrens{at}hotmail.com.

Psychomotor slowing (PS) is a cluster of symptoms that was already recognized in schizophrenia by its earliest investigators. Nevertheless, few studies have been dedicated to the clarification of the nature and the role of the phenomenon in this illness. Moreover, slowed psychomotor functioning is often not clearly delineated from reduced processing speed. The current, first review of all existing literature on the subject discusses the key findings. Firstly, PS is a clinically observable feature that is most frequently established by neuropsychological measures assessing speed of fine movements such as writing or tasks that require rapid fingertip manipulations or the maintenance of maximal speed over brief periods of time in manual activities. Moreover, the slowed performance on the various psychomotor measures has been demonstrated independent of medication and has also been found to be associated with negative symptoms and, to a lesser extent, with positive and depressive symptoms. Importantly, performance on the psychomotor tasks proved related to the patients' social, clinical, and functional outcomes. Several imaging studies showed slowed performance to coincide with dopaminergic striatal activity. Finally, conventional neuroleptics do not improve the patients' PS symptoms, in contrast to the atypical agents that do seem to produce modestly improving effects.

Keywords: finger tapping / pegboard tasks / processing speed / schizophrenia / slowing / writing


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