[Continuous attention in schizophrenic patients]

Continuous Attention Task (CAT) was applied in a group of schizophrenic patients (N = 35), patients with schizoaffective disorder (N = 17), major depressive episode (N = 14), chronic alcohol dependence (N = 16) and healthy volunteers (N = 31). Moreover, the patients were examined with the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS) and the intelligence test (DMI). The results of the CAT test were significantly better in the group of healthy subjects and depressive patients in comparison to the other groups. There were no differences in CAT test between the schizophrenic, schizoaffective and alcohol dependent patients. There were no differences in CAT between the depressive patients and the healthy subjects either. The differences in the CAT results could not be contributed to the PANSS scores. The depressive patients got higher scores on the logical multiplication scale (MN) and the analogy scale (AN) of intellectual ability test (DMI) as compared to the schizophrenic patients, and higher scores on the MN scale in comparison to the alcohol dependent subjects. It was concluded that the deficits in CAT scores could be connected with the deficits in intellectual functions.