Table 4.

Table 4 Summary of research findings

- Particular psychotic symptoms are not in themselves strong associates or predictors of schizophrenia, because of their relative rarity, the difficulties in reliably eliciting them and their lack of specificity.

- Developmental abnormalities (social, sensorimotor, intellectual), whether elicited in the history or on examination, merit formal evaluation as potential diagnostic aids, but these may simply be trait markers.

- A number of genetic markers of schizophrenia have been identified, but the impact of such testing in clinical practice needs to be established.

- Of currently available technological approaches, structural brain imaging looks most promising as a diagnostic aid, and in the early detection of psychosis (at least within high risk populations).

- Functional imaging should be more sensitive, but is more expensive and technically demanding, and may have particular value in differential diagnosis and response prediction.

Imaging and other approaches should be further improved by genotyping and/or other biomarkers as they become available - although with each additional test false negatives tend to become more of a problem.

- Ideally, clinically significant test results should be examined in clinical trials to establish whether thetime and expense involved impacts favourably on patient outcome.