Effects of neurocognitive enhancement therapy in schizophrenia: normalisation of memory performance

A preponderance of research indicates that cognitive function in schizophrenia can be improved through cognitive remediation. However, few studies have attempted to characterise the extent of improvement relative to nonpsychiatric controls.

Cognitive performance on reaction time, digit recall, and word recall of 58 schizophrenia patients at baseline and after 6 months of cognitive remediation was compared to the performance on these tasks of 39 community controls. Schizophrenia patients participated in Neurocognitive Enhancement Therapy (NET) and received hierarchical training on the memory tasks, but not on the reaction time task, which was only administered at intake and follow-up.

The schizophrenia sample showed significantly poorer performances than the community control sample on all three tasks at baseline. NET led to significant improvements in performance on trained memory tasks, but not the untrained reaction time task. There was a significant increase in the proportion of schizophrenia patients who achieved normal range performance on the memory tasks.

52% of schizophrenia patients who were impaired on at least one of the memory tasks normalised their performance on at least one of those tasks as a result of cognitive training. Results suggest that clinically meaningful improvement may be possible using cognitive remediation.