Negative symptoms across psychotic spectrum disorders

Our results support the notion of a psychopathological gradient across the psychosis continuum from patients with delusional disorder, at one extreme of the scope, to those with schizoaffective disorder, at the other. More importantly, we have found out that in delusional disorder, negative symptoms do exist and are of similar intensity as positive symptoms. We proposed that the assessment of negative symptoms should be routine as part of clinical mental status examination of delusional disorder patients.