Neurocognitive rehabilitation of the patients with chronic schizophrenia

Pages: 774-777
Neelam Kumari and Jai Prakash (Department of Clinical Psychology, Ranchi Institute of Neuro Psychiatry & Allied Sciences (RINPAS), Ranchi)

The cognitive profile in schizophrenia is characterized by deficits across several domains, notably attention, memory and executive functions. The aspects of executive functions that are compromised in schizophrenia are the capacities for volitional activity, forward planning and self regulation. Therefore, cognitive enhancement interventions programs have been achieving importance and interest because they may provide direct benefits to patients with executive dysfunctions (Wykes et al., 2011). To see the effect of executive function rehabilitaton training on patients with schizophrenia. By using purposive sampling technique, 10 patients of schizophrenia were chosen according to ICD 10 DCR criteria and were divided randomly into two groups, experimental group and control group. Executive functioning was assessed among all the participants of experimental group as well as control group by using WCST. After baseline assessment, executive function rehabilitation training was provided to the experimental group using executive function module of Brainwave R series and after the training both the groups were assessed by using WCST. The patients with schizophrenia demonstrated improvement in various measures of WCST namely perseverative errors, percent perseverative errors, non perseverative errors, percent non perseverative errors, conceptual level responses, percent conceptual level responses and number of categories completed after they underwent executive function rehabilitation training.