From Psychiatric News Alert: A new study provides further evidence that cognitive deficits appear in individuals at risk for psychosis well before the first episode of acute psychosis–i.e., the “first break”–appears. The study is published online in Schizophrenia Research by the Department of Psychiatry at the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine in Turkey. The study compared cognitive functions of four groups of people:

• Patients at ultra high risk for psychosis–UHR
• Patients who had a first episode of psychosis (FES), their 30 healthy siblings (who were considered to be at familial high risk, FHR), and 35 healthy controls with no familial risk.

The researchers found that the FES group had worse neuropsychological performance than did controls on all of the cognitive domains measured, and the UHR group had worse performance on three of them—verbal learning, attention, and working memory—than did controls. They also found that individuals with familial risk had worse performance on executive functions and measures of attention than did the control group. In addition, the FES group had lower global composite scores than did the UHR group and scored worse on a measure of sustained attention than did their siblings in the FHR group.

The researchers concluded that their findings “suggest that cognitive deficits in schizophrenia may start before the first episode, since cognitive functions were similar among FHR, UHR, and FES groups. Our aim as a next step is to detect cognitive predictors of transition to psychosis in both groups in a study with a longitudinal design and with larger sample size.”

For research on improving cognitive function in patients with schizophrenia, see thePsychiatric News article, “Optimism Grows About Potential to Aid Schizophrenia Cognition.” For a review of assessment and treatment issues in schizophrenia, see American Psychiatric Publishing’s Clinical Manual for Treatment of Schizophrenia. And for a recent study on this topic, see the American Journal of Psychiatry report“Anatomical and Functional Brain Abnormalities in Drug-Naïve First-Episode Schizophrenia.”

Related articles

• Genetic Overlap Found Between Schizophrenia And Cognitive Ability (forbes.com)
• Oscillatory Underpinnings of Mismatch Negativity and Their Relationship with Cognitive Function in Patients with Schizophrenia (plosone.org)
• A Genetic Deconstruction of Neurocognitive Traits in Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder (plosone.org)
• The Importance of Developing Tools to Make Early Psychosis Intervention a Reality (namisouthbay.com)