ABSTRACT
In this chapter we will analyze data from the Madras Longitudinal Schizophrenia Study in which patients were followed up monthly after their first hospitalization for schizophrenia. The study is described in detail in Thara et al. (1994). Here we use a subset of the data analyzed by Diggle et al. (2002), namely data on thought disorder (1: present, 0: absent) at 0, 2, 6, 8, and 10 months after hospitalization on women only. The thought disorder responses are given as y0 to y10 in Table 9.1 where a “.” indicates a missing value. The variable early is a dummy variable for early onset of disease (1: age-of-onset less than 20 years, 0: age-of-onset 20 years or above). An important question here is whether the course of illness differs between patients with early and late onset. We will also reanalyze the post-natal depression data described in the previous chapter.
