Functional outcomes

What are functional outcomes? 

Functional outcomes include work performance, relationships, and living skills which may be adversely affected by schizophrenia. Developing coping skills to manage general life stressors and illness complications may help improve functional outcomes.

What is the evidence for functional outcomes?

Moderate to high quality evidence finds small associations between better functioning after treatment for first-episode psychosis and shorter duration of untreated psychosis, less severe symptoms (both at baseline and after treatment), better premorbid functioning, better cognitive functioning, more education, longer work history, and female gender.

Moderate quality evidence finds more severe negative symptoms are associated with poorer cognitive and community functioning, and smaller social network size. Better functioning is related to better quality of life, and the most commonly reported strategies people with schizophrenia use to cope with symptoms and general life stress are avoidance and problem-focused strategies, which improve quality of life and long-term symptom outcomes.

Moderate to high quality evidence finds an association between poor cognitive functioning and poor functional outcomes. In particular, poor community functioning is associated with poor social, emotion and information processing, and poor working memory, attention and reasoning; poor social skills are associated with poor attention, visual learning, reasoning, verbal learning, and insight; poor social behaviour is associated with poor emotion processing, verbal learning, and reasoning; poor problem solving is associated with poor attention, working memory, verbal learning, and reasoning.

Moderate to low quality evidence finds medication is associated with a range of disability including pain, anxiety, insomnia, somnolence, appetite, fatigue, and libido. The intensity of disability is associated with treatment, symptoms, socio-demographics, global disability, emotional functioning, and cognitive functioning.

August 2020

Last updated at: 1:42 am, 13th August 2020
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