Quetiapine treatment and improved cognitive functioning in borderline personality disorder

We aimed to assess whether executive functioning improved over time in a sample of borderline personality disorder (BPD) subjects that took part in a quetiapine treatment trial.

Performance on the following neurocognitive tasks was assessed at enrolment and at the end of the 12 weeks quetiapine treatment: Trail Making Task, Word Fluency Task and Tower of London Task. Forty-one BPD patients were recruited, of whom 32 completed the trial. An intention-to-treat analysis with a mixed linear model was applied.

The data show that participants significantly improved on most executive functioning measures. Patients' scores decreased significantly (mean [SD] difference; p-value) on the Trail Making Task Part A (11.7 [2.3]; p < 0.0001), Part B (51.8 [9.2]; p < 0.0001) and 'B minus A' (40.1 [8.2]; p < 0.0001), on a Phonological (15.9 [1.6]; p < 0.0001) and Semantic (9.8 [1.1]; p < 0.0001) Verbal Fluency tasks, and on the Tower of London total correct score (2.5 [0.4]; p < 0.0001), total move score (29.5 [4.5]; p < 0.0001) and total time (172.9 [35.8]; p < 0.0001).

In this study we have demonstrated that executive functioning in BPD is improved after treatment with quetiapine. Neurocognitive measures of executive functioning should be considered as valuable outcomes in the study of treatment efficacy in BPD.