Cognitive impairments in schizophrenia in foreign studies: single function deficits or group of syndromes?

Cognitive deficit is the one of the key groups of symptoms in schizophrenia. These disorders reflect pathological processes in the central nervous system and are an important predictor of the social functioning recovery of patients. The question of the deficit structure remains open. In some cases, cognitive impairments are detected in early school age, in others, they appear only in adolescence. At the disease onset, there is a sharp deterioration in cognitive functioning. Further change is also heterogeneous: the same cognitive functions can either remain stable, or deteriorate or improve. To further study the cognitive deficit, it is necessary to distinguish more homogeneous groups based on both clinical parameters, and on the results of performing cognitive tests. It is important for the future of the concept of cognitive deficit to correlate it with the usual conceptualizations, including pathopsychological symptom groups.