Memory and attention deficits in drug naive patients with schizophrenia

The present study was designed to evaluate the integrity of cognitive front o-temporal processes in drug naive patients with schizophrenia. The evaluat ion of drug naive patients discards the potential influence of medication, and may allow the specification of cognitive impairments that are truly ill ness-related. Subcomponents of long-term memory as well as several measures of attention were examined. A group of 16 patients who had never taken ant ipsychotics and a group of 20 normal controls underwent tests of alertness, information maintaining, and sustained and selective attention, as well as tests of explicit and implicit recall. The psychopathological manifestatio ns of patients were also assessed with the BPRS, PANSS, ESRS clinical scale s. Attention test performances revealed that drug naive patients presented a decrease in their ability to respond promptly to a stimulus, sustain thei r attention on a task, display normal selective attention strategies, and m aintain information for on-line processing. The results also suggest that t he drug naive patients are impaired when both strategic and associative pro cesses must be triggered to explicitly recover information in long-term mem ory. In contrast, the results revealed that implicit access to perceptual m ental representations is spared in schizophrenic patients. Finally, feature s of the patients' clinical symptomatology and some cognitive deficits were also shown to be correlated. Overall, results showed that, in relation to normals, drug naive patients were mildly impaired, with little intersubject variability, and that not all cognitive processes were equally disturbed i n relation to the normal subjects' performances. Results support the idea t hat an important part of the impairments seen in schizophrenia is present b efore the introduction of neuroleptic medication and chronic illness. (C) 2 001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.