Functional milestones and clinician ratings of everyday functioning in people with schizophrenia: Overlap between milestones and specificity of ratings

Everyday functioning is known to be impaired in people with schizophrenia, across multiple functional domains. It is not clear, however, how impairments across social, vocational, and residential domains overlap with each other, Further, although there are multiple ratings scales available to rate everyday functioning, it is also not clear how scores on these scales, particularly total scores, relate to milestone achievement. This is important, because efforts to reduce disability with pharmacological or rehabilitative interventions are ultimately evaluated in terms of their impact on everyday functioning, which is often indexed with total scores on rating scales. In this paper from the VALERO study, we report on 195 people with schizophrenia who were rated with a comprehensive process on 6 different functional status rating scales. Milestone achievements in social (ever married or equivalent), vocational (ever employed, currently employed), and residential (living independently, financially responsible) domains were examined for their overlap with each other and with ratings on the rating scales. Total scores on the 6 rating scales were minimally related to milestone achievements and milestone achievements were quite independent of each other. Subscales from two of the rating scales, specifically examining vocational and residential functioning, were specifically related to milestone achievements in their functional domains, but not other milestones. These data suggest that global scores on everyday functioning measures may not capture functional milestones and highlight the fact that functional milestones have multiple determinants other then the ability variables that these rating scales attempt to capture.