The clinical core (Core B) of the CCNMD will provide recruitment, assessment, diagnostic, tracking and referral services to the projects of the CCNMD. These projects include both post-mortem neuropathological assessment and sophisticated neuroimaging studies. Patients with schizophrenia with a wide range of severity of illness and functional outcome will be recruited, including patients who have experienced only two episodes of illness to patients with a continuous institutional stay approaching seven decades. Recruitment will be facilitated by an existing network of research sites, including 4 VA hospitals (funded by a VA MIRECC award), a large public psychiatric hospital, an academic medical center, and multiple community clinics and nursing homes. These sites have already yielded a cohort of over 1,500 geriatric patients with schizophrenia, who will continue to participate in the different studies in this proposed CCNMD. Using previously validated techniques, a research quality diagnosis will be ascertained on all patients, using both structured psychiatric interviews and formalized chart review procedures. Assessments, including clinical symptoms, cognitive functions, and functional skills, as well as health status and movement disorders, will also be performed on all patients. These assessments have been implemented in multiple studies previously of this population and have been carefully selected, updated, and modified to reflect the characteristics of the patients examined. These assessments will be continuously evaluated for the reliability. Furthermore, all patients will be tracked, using procedures developed over the past twelve years, in order to maintain contact with them as members of a large longitudinal cohort of well-assessed patients with schizophrenia. The information collected by this core will be immediately disseminated to the Brain Bank Core (Core C), Data Management and Statistics Core (Core D), and the PIs of individual projects. Leaders of this core will be in constant contact with the directors of other cores and projects to allow for updating of the recruitment and assessment goals in response to the findings of the studies and the rate of recruitment.
Showing the most recent 10 out of 153 publications
