Dimensions of attention impairment and negative symptoms in schizophrenia: a multidimensional approach using the...

The aim of this study was to assess the specific features of attention impairment in patients with schizophrenia and the correlation between those features and the patients' clinical status.

We administered the Conners Continuous Performance Test (CPT-II), with cognitive and clinical scales, to 40 Spanish inpatients with schizophrenia and 40 healthy controls, and used a cross-sectional design to compare the groups' performances. We identified correlations between the measures and used multiple regression analyses to develop models showing how attention impairment contributed to clinical status.

The patients with schizophrenia showed significantly poorer performance than controls in 5 CPT-II measures that were related to focused attention. We also found that CPT-II measures primarily linked to focused attention had a significant association with negative symptoms. These CPT-II measures predicted 37% of the variability in negative symptoms in the regression model. We observed a more modest relationship among CPT-II measures of disorganized thought symptoms, global functioning, and general cognitive performance.

Attention impairment in schizophrenia primarily involves difficulty in focusing attention, mainly related to negative symptoms. By contrast, sustained attention and vigilance seem to be affected only as a secondary consequence of the impairment to focusing attention.