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Paternal age related schizophrenia (PARS) has been proposed as a subgroup of schizophrenia with distinct etiology, pathophysiology and symptoms. This study uses a k-means clustering analysis approach to generate hypotheses about differences between PARS and other cases of schizophrenia.

We studied PARS (operationally defined as not having any family history of schizophrenia among first and second-degree relatives and fathers' age at birth ≥35years) in a series of schizophrenia cases recruited from a research unit. Data were available on demographic variables, symptoms (Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale; PANSS), cognitive tests (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale—Revised; WAIS-R) and olfaction (University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test; UPSIT). We conducted a series of k-means clustering analyses to identify clusters of cases containing high …