Abstract
At the beginning of the 20th century, schizophrenia was widely regarded as a chronic, progressive, and deteriorative illness although some cases with a more favorable course were observed. Current researchers tend to apply syndromology in order to get a clearer outline of the favorable variants of the condition.
The knowledge of prognostic factors can help specialists, patients and their relatives to a better understanding of schizophrenia, and to some degree exert influence on the illness itself. The aim of this article is to update traditional information on prognostic factors by showing the results of modern studies which deal with morphologic and functional progress correlatives.
The predominant clinically important factors are: lateral ventricles size, gray matter reduction (significant in the frontal and temporal lobe, and the thalamus), characteristics of the beginning of the illness, response to the treatment, occurrence of relapses, duration of untreated psychosis, occurrence of negative symptoms, cognitive impairment, adherence to the treatment, substance abuse, premorbid social adaptation, and the patient's age at the beginning of the disease.