Algorithm for the treatment of negative symptoms in chronic schizophrenia.

Negative symptoms in a chronic stage should be carefully evaluated, because chronic symptoms of schizophrenia have been influenced by drug treatments. The optimized neuroleptic treatment and analysis of psychological or environmental factors are sometimes effective to negative symptoms in a chronic stage. However, the patients with the negative symptoms still exist, and the drug effective to negative symptom is not now available in Japan. Therefore, the present algorithms for the treatment of schizophrenia may be not available, and a different algorithm should be prepared to reflect practice in Japan. We proposed here the algorithm for the treatment of negative symptoms in chronic schizophrenia in Japan.