Opinions of French patients with schizophrenia regarding injectable medication.

Background: Use of patient-reported outcomes to assess the care of individuals with schizophrenia is increasing. We describe a survey (questionnaire) that evaluates patient opinions on long-acting injectable antipsychotic medication.

Methods: Psychiatrists throughout France selected consenting patients with schizophrenia who had received at least three months' treatment with a long-acting injectable antipsychotic (either typical or atypical) as outpatients to be interviewed by professional interviewers.

Factors associated with medication non-adherence in patients suffering from schizophrenia: a cross-sectional study in a universal coverage health-care system.

Objective: To quantify the factors associated with non-adherence to medication among stable patients suffering from schizophrenia in the context of universal access to care.

Methods: This naturalistic, multicentric study was conducted in 15 French public hospitals in a region of south-eastern France during a 1 week period in 2008. All consecutive outpatients with stable schizophrenia were recruited.

Are there specific care requirements for patients with schizophrenia and diabetes or with a risk of diabetes?

An interactive workshop was held to discuss the risk of diabetes in patients with schizophrenia, to evaluate the available data concerning how such patients should be managed in terms of minimising the risk of diabetes and of optimising their care where diabetes to develop. The subjects discussed covered monitoring of risk factors, education about lifestyle and the risk of diabetes, patient care and treatment options, and interfaces between psychiatry and diabetology. The workshop noted that all patients with a diagnosis of schizophrenia had an elevated risk of developing diabetes and that this needed to be reflected in the follow-up of the patients in order to reduce the chances of the emergence of disease.

An investigation of semantic priming in schizophrenia using a new priming paradigm.

In the present study, twenty schizophrenic patients and twenty healthy controls were tested in a new priming paradigm that allows a clear distinction to be made between automatic, perceptual priming effects and effects related to decision bias. Participants had to identify briefly presented masked target words preceded by clearly visible primes that were semantically related to the target or not. Target presentation duration corresponded to a pre-determined perceptual threshold for each participant, and a two-alternative forced-choice methodology was used.