Enhancement In Schizophrenia Research Articles

Atypical antipsychotic medications and memory enhancement in schizophrenia

Atypical antipsychotic medications and memory enhancement in schizophrenia

Studies of cognitive change in patients with schizophrenia following novel antipsychotic treatment.

Novel antipsychotic medications have been reported to have beneficial effects on cognitive functioning in patients with schizophrenia. However, these effects have been assessed in studies with considerable variation in methodology. A large number of investigator-initiated and industry-sponsored clinical trials are currently underway to determine the effect of various novel antipsychotics on cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia. The ability to discriminate between high- and low-quality studies will be required to understand the true implications of these studies and their relevance to clinical practice. This article addresses several aspects of research on cognitive enhancement in schizophrenia, emphasizing how the assessment of cognitive function in clinical trials requires certain standards of study design to lead to interpretable results. Novel antipsychotic medications appear to have preliminary promise for the enhancement of cognitive functioning. However, the methodology for assessing the treatment of cognitive deficits is still being developed. Researchers and clinicians alike need to approach publications in this area with a watchful eye toward methodological weaknesses that limit the interpretability of findings.

Behavioral and P3 amplitude enhancement in schizophrenia following feedback training

In order to clarify the remediability of behavioral and electrophysiological abnormalities in schizophrenia, hit rate, reaction time, and P3 amplitude from auditory event-related potentials were evaluated before and after feedback training of a task in 14 schizophrenics and 12 age-matched normal controls. Although mean changes in the three indices due to the training were nonsignificant in both schizophrenic and normal control groups as a whole, the changes in hit rate and reaction time correlated significantly with the P3 amplitude change in the schizophrenic ( r = 0.60 and −0.58, respectively) but not in the normal control group. The P3 amplitude change also correlated with the P3 amplitude before the training only in the schizophrenic group ( r = −0.68), suggesting that the training was more effective for the schizophrenic patients with marked P3 amplitude reduction. The observed P3 amplitude increase due to training may represent an electrophysiological correlate of a remediable aspect of behavioral deficits in schizophrenics, which may underlie the effectiveness of nonpharmacological treatments.

Schizophrenic patients' sensitivity to social cues: the role of abstraction.

Since individuals with schizophrenia often have difficulty with abstract tasks, they should have more problems recognizing abstract social cues (e.g., inferences regarding actors' affect and goals) than concrete cues (e.g., observations of actors' behavior and dialogue). Moreover, recognition of abstract and concrete cues should interact with the level of emotional arousal engendered by the situation; previous research has shown that schizophrenic patients perform better on cue recognition tasks when the situation produces moderate rather than low levels of arousal. These hypotheses were tested in 24 patients with schizophrenia diagnosed according to the DSM-III-R criteria and 15 normal comparison subjects. All subjects viewed eight short vignettes of interpersonal situations that produce low and moderate levels of arousal. They then answered questions representing perception of abstract and concrete cues that had been matched for difficulty and consistency. The schizophrenic patients were significantly less sensitive to interpersonal cues than the normal subjects. The patients were also less sensitive to abstract than to concrete social cues, and for them there was a significant interaction between cue abstraction level and situational arousal. Specifically, the schizophrenic subjects performed worse on the abstract cue recognition task for the low-arousal situations. Findings regarding the social cue recognition patterns of schizophrenic patients could play an important role in the development of valid measures of social cognition for this population.