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Medicine Notes Psychiatry Notes

Schizophrenia Notes

Updated Schizophrenia Notes

Psychiatry Notes

Psychiatry

Approximately 43 pages

Clinically-relevant notes for medical finals. Includes all the common psychiatric conditions along with notes on dementia and child psychiatry. Colour coded per topic. Easy to follow and breaks down the main presenting features and treatments (both drugs, psychological therapies and ECT)
Very useful for finals revision....

Available here

The following is a more accessible plain text extract of the PDF sample above, taken from our Psychiatry Notes. Due to the challenges of extracting text from PDFs, it will have odd formatting:

Schizophrenia

Severe and chronic psychotic illness characterized by impairments in

  • Perception

  • Cognition

  • Social functioning

  • Occupational functioning

Psychosis = impairment of mental function to such a degree that it interferes with everyday living and reduces individuals capacity to maintain adequate contact with reality

Epidemiology

  • 1% prevalence

  • M>F (earlier onset in males)

Aetiology

  • Genetic factors

    • Strong genetic component

    • Likely to involve several genes (but not yet found)

  • Prenatal factors

    • Associated with exposure to viral infections as a neonate

  • Social factors

    • Urban environment, unemployment, deprivation, traumatic life events

    • Illicit drug use e.g cannabis and amphetamines

  • Neurological factors

    • Increased risk in those who have had head injuries

    • Increased risk of schizophrenia in temporal lobe epilepsy

  • Neurochemical factors

    • “Dopamine hypothesis”

      • Suggests positive symptoms caused by dopamine overactivity in the mesolimbic system

Differential diagnoses

  • Drug/alcohol withdrawal/abuse

  • Temporal lobe epilepsy

  • Head injury

  • Cerebral tumour

  • Encephalitis

Clinical features

  • Highly suggestive – “Schneider’s first rank symptoms”

    • Auditory hallucinations

      • Usually 3rd person, abusive comments about pts personality or behaviour

    • Thought disorder

      • Usually reflected in speech

      • Loosening of associations (Knight’s Move), flight of ideas

    • Delusional beliefs

      • Thought withdrawal, thought insertion, thought broadcasting, paranoid delusions, delusions of reference, made feelings or actions...

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