General and social cognition in remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients: a comparative study.

General and social cognition in remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients: a comparative study. Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci. 2016 Jun 1; Authors: Caldiroli A, Buoli M, Serati M, Cahn W, Altamura AC Abstract The aim of this paper was to investigate whether both neurocognitive and social cognitive performances were different between remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients, non-remitters and healthy controls (HC). We assessed social cognition (Degraded Facial Affect Recognition Task-DFAR and Emotional Mentalizing Task-EMT) and neurocognition (Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale and Word Learning Test-WLT) in 174 remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients, 110 non-remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients and 320 HC. Multivariate analyses of variance with age, gender and IQ as covariates (MANCOVA) were performed to compare mean cognitive test scores between the three groups. Remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients performed significantly worse than HC only in one verbal memory task (WLT immediate recall; p = 0.004); in the same test, they were significantly better than non-remitters (p = 0.027). Non-remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients, differently from remitters, performed significantly worse than HC in terms of social cognition (EMT-p < 0.05 and DFAR-p < 0.05). Remitted first-episode schizophrenia patients presented worse cognitive performance than HC in verbal memory tasks, but not in ...
Source: European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Eur Arch Psychiatry Clin Neurosci Source Type: research