負性症狀需要跨學科通力合作

The Need of More Interdisciplinary Collaboration in Understanding Negative Symptoms

With interest, we have read the overview “Developing Drugs for Negative Symptoms of Schizophrenia” by C.M. Liu. Here we would like to offer some supplementary materials about understanding negative symptoms. In symptomatology, we suggest that negative symptoms are not specifi c to schizophrenia, although the term of “negative symptom” is restricted to schizophrenia spectrum disorders. A recent review have listed 19 disorders in DSM-5 to have similar diagnostic criteria or associated features of blunted affect, alogia, anhedonia, avolition, or asociality. In neurology, neurodegenerative disorders such as Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's disease, and frontotemporal dementia may manifest the symptom of apathy which can be identifi ed as negative symptoms. But, the interdisciplinary communication about negative symptoms has been rare. It might be due to the labeling of negative symptoms to be schizophrenic patients. In the past, two debatable developments existed about negative symptoms. The one is the proposal of “persistent negative symptoms” which also involved the patients that failed to respond to usual treatments for secondary negative symptoms.