New advances in the understanding of schizophrenia etiology, course, and treatment have increased interest on the part of patients, families, advocates, and professionals in the development of consensus-defined standards for clinical status and improvement, including illness remission and recovery. As demonstrated in the area of mood disorders, such standards provide greater clarity around treatment goals, as well as an improved framework for the design and comparison of investigational trials and the subsequent evaluation of the effectiveness of interventions. Unlike the approach to mood disorders, however, the novel application of the concept of standard outcome criteria to schizophrenia must reflect the wide heterogeneity of its long-term course and outcome, as well as the variable effects of different treatments on schizophrenia symptoms. As an initial step in developing operational criteria, an expert working group reviewed available definitions and assessment instruments to provide a conceptual framework for symptomatic, functional, and cognitive domains in schizophrenia as they relate to remission of illness. The first consensus-based operational criteria for symptomatic remission in schizophrenia are based on distinct thresholds for reaching and maintaining improvement, as opposed to change criteria, allowing for alignment with traditional concepts of remission in both psychiatric and nonpsychiatric illness. This innovative approach for standardizing the definition for outcome in schizophrenia will require further examination of its validity and utility, as well as future refinement, particularly in relation to psychosocial and cognitive function and dysfunction. These criteria should facilitate research and support a positive, longer-term approach to studying outcome in patients with schizophrenia.

The structured consensus method was a feasible and fair mechanism for choosing candidate tests, and direct comparison of beta battery tests in a common sample allowed selection of a final consensus battery. The MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery is expected to be the standard tool for assessing cognitive change in clinical trials of cognition-enhancing drugs for schizophrenia. It may also aid evaluation of cognitive remediation strategies.

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Take-down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. Heritability and polygenic predictionIn the EUR sample, the SNP-based heritability (h 2 SNP ) (that is, the proportion of variance in liability attributable to all measured SNPs)

The conference participants recommended that mental health care providers perform physical health monitoring that typically occurs in primary care settings for their patients who do not receive physical health monitoring in those settings. This change in usual practice is recommended on the basis of the conference participants' belief that this additional monitoring will result in the earlier detection of common, serious risk factors that could, without detection and intervention, contribute to impaired health of patients with schizophrenia.

The participants in the NIMH-MATRICS Consensus Development Conference on Negative Symptoms recommended that an instrument be developed that measured blunted affect, alogia, asociality, anhedonia, and avolition. The Brief Negative Symptom Scale (BNSS) is a 13-item instrument designed for clinical trials and other studies that measures these 5 domains. The interrater, test-retest, and internal consistency of the instrument were strong, with respective intraclass correlation coefficients of 0.93 for the BNSS total score and values of 0.89-0.95 for individual subscales. Comparisons with positive symptoms and other negative symptom instruments supported the discriminant and concurrent validity of the instrument.

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Co-norming a battery such as the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery, comprising tests from independent test developers each with their own set of norms, facilitates valid interpretation of test scores and communication of findings across studies. These normative data will aid in estimating the magnitude of change during clinical trials of cognition-enhancing agents and make it possible to derive more directly interpretable composite scores.