Investigation of explicit verbal memory in patient with paranoid schizophrenia and their first degree relatives.
The aim of the current study is to characterize the prevalence, degree and nature of verbal memory deficit in schizophrenia; to study verbal memory task performance in patient with paranoid schizophrenia and their first degree relatives in order to identify, trait cognitive marker of the disorder. Besides the authors studied, whether nonpsychotic relatives of schizophrenic probands had an elevated risk of deficits in cognitive functioning, and, which of specific factors: gender, age, education, illness duration, diagnosis and psychopathological symptoms influenced the tests performance. Twenty schizophrenia inpatients (10 men; mean age=34.2 years, SD=9.1; mean education=13.6 years, SD=2.6) were recruited from the psychiatric hospital. All patients met DSM-IV criteria for schizophrenia and clinically assessed by SANS (negative symptoms) and SAPS (positive symptoms). The patients had no history of neurological disease, systemic disease known to involve CNS functioning, clinically significant head injury, or mental retardation.


METHODS
twenty-eight nonpsychiatric healthy volunteers (14 men; mean age=35.0 years, SD=10.7; mean education=14.3 years, SD=3.46) were recruited from the community. Schizophrenia patients showed significant impairment of the verbal memory in all domains. In contrast, their first degree relatives having the same education level as the patients did not differ considerably from healthy controls. These results indicate that, probably, the deterioration of explicit verbal memory is not associated with the predisposition for schizophrenia. As the test performance did not correlate with severity of symptoms this finding cannot be attributed to the distractibility due to active psychotic symptoms, or medication effects. Impaired performance on the CVLT task, a measure of explicit verbal working memory, appears to be associated with the cognitive deficits due to the disorder itself.
Chkonia
E
E
Tbilisi State Medical University, Department of Neuromedicine, Psychiatry.
Tsverava
L
L
D000328:Adult; D005190:Family; D005260:Female; D020022:Genetic Predisposition to Disease; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D008568:Memory / Q000502:physiology*; D012563:Schizophrenia, Paranoid / Q000235:genetics / Q000503:physiopathology*; D012720:Severity of Illness Index; D014705:Verbal Behavior / Q000502:physiology*