Several definitions of schizophrenia still exist and no single cause has been found to explain all aspects of this devastating syndrome. Most likely, the symptoms are triggered by a number of disease processes coupled with genetic factors and environmental stresses. It is important to note that positive and negative symptoms may overlap and interact with each other, so categorization may be misleading. Positive symptoms, according to one study improve in concert with negative symptoms, indicating some biologic link. A schizophrenic patient may have more than one symptom, but rarely does a patient with schizophrenia have all of them.
Symptoms often go into remission.
As the mechanisms in the brain that lead to schizophrenia are being discovered, researchers are attempting to define more accurate ways of describing the disease as it relates to the biologic processes that cause them. Negative Symptoms Negative symptoms reflect the diminishment of the self, lack of emotions, colorless speaking tones, and a general loss of interest in life. Negative symptoms, such as lack of responsiveness and poor sociability, often appear in childhood as the first symptoms of schizophrenia and go unnoticed in many people who later develop full-blown schizophrenia. In others, however, negative symptoms do not appear until after the positive symptoms develop. Negative symptoms may co-exist with positive symptoms and typically persist after positive symptoms have been treated, and they tend to be more common than positive symptoms in older patients.