Schizophrenic Symptoms in Late Paraphrenia

The prevalence of most individual schizophrenic symptoms in late paraphrenia is unknown. Previous attempts to characterize the symptoms of late paraphrenia have been retrospective case-note studies, have not used standardized assessment instruments or have only examined small populations of patients. We examined 83 late paraphrenic patients using the Present State Examination. Persecutory delusions occurred in 86.7% of patients and were the most common symptom elicited. Nonverbal (63.8%) and verbal third person (50.6%) auditory hallucinations were common, as were visual hallucinations (30.1 %). Earlier authors have claimed that thought insertion and thought withdrawal do not occur in late paraphrenia; we found them in 15.7 and 6.0%, respectively, of our patients.