Schizophrenia symptoms hamper regular medication
Regular medication for people with schizophrenia is vital to avoid relapse, but recent research shows that the disease impairs memory tasks, leaving patients likely to forget to take their tablets.
Psychologist Dr Elizabeth Maylor at the University of Warwick and her colleagues hypothesised that patients with schizophrenia would have problems with habitual tasks – like taking medicine every few hours – that rely on prospective memory.
This kind of memory allows individuals to remember to do something in the future, unprompted, and the team suspected this prospective memory would be impaired in people with schizophrenia as they tend to confuse real and imagined events. They might mistake remembering they have to do something with remembering they have actually done it.
The researchers compared the prospective memory of people with and without the disease by asking them to manoeuvre a ball around an obstacle course for 90 seconds. They were asked to turn over a counter when they were at least 25 seconds into the exercise – a task that required the use of prospective memory
They found that those with schizophrenia were more likely to forget to turn over the counter and approximately a third of those with the condition reported they had turned over the counter when they had not done so.
Dr Maylor reports: “This is the first study to show that schizophrenia is associated with an overall impairment in habitual prospective memory performance”.
“This would seem a worryingly high probability for such an apparently simple task that posed few problems for control participants.”
The team reasons that the inaccuracy of self-reporting demonstrated in this task suggests recollection of other habitual prospective memory tasks, such as taking medication, are likely to be “particularly unreliable”.
Schizophrenia is a relatively common condition, with around one in a hundred people thought to be affected at some pointing their lives.
There is no cure, but the condition can be managed with antipsychotic drugs, although 80% of those coming off their medication after an acute episode will have a relapse within a year.
