Gender Differences in Patients With Schizophrenia in Terms of Sociodemographic and Clinical Characteristics

The aim of this study is to investigate gender differences in patients with schizophrenia and to consider if the resultant findings will help us to understand the etiopathogenesis, distinctive clinical characteristics, and course of the illness. 40 female and 40 male inpatients admitted to Bakirkoy Neuropsychiatric Hospital and met the diagnostic criteria of DSM-IV for schizophrenia included in our study. They were administered the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS), the Scale for the Assessment of Positive Symptoms (SAPS), and the Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). And a detailed questionnaire prepared to collect sociodemographic and clinical data was used. This study demonstrated that female patients were more likely to be married and to have better social and occupational functioning. They had higher rates of positive familial history of schizophrenia, and of attempted suicide than males. Male patients, however, had and earlier age of onset, they spent a shorter time between the appearance of first psychotic symptoms and onset of treatment and were younger during first treatment than females. Total SANS, SAPS and BPRS scores of males were also higher than females. They had higher number of hospitalizations with longer length of stay (although this is not statistically significant), and their problems with law and substance abuse were more frequently observed compared to female patients. In addition, female patients exhibited more heavily paranoid symptoms, while male patients tended to display the disorganized subtype of the illness (German J Psychiatry 2006;9:41-47).