%0 Journal Article
%T Executive attention impairment in first-episode schizophrenia
%A Gricel Orellana
%A Andrea Slachevsky
%A Marcela Pe£¿a
%J BMC Psychiatry
%D 2012
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1471-244x-12-154
%X We evaluated 22 FES patients from 17 to 29£¿years of age with a recent history of a single psychotic episode treated only with atypical neuroleptics, and 20 healthy persons matched with FES patients by sex, age, and educational level as the control group. Attention was estimated using the ANT in which participants indicate whether a central horizontal arrow is pointing to the left or the right. The central arrow may be preceded by spatial or temporal cues denoting where and when the arrow will appear, and may be flanked by other arrows (hereafter, flankers) pointing in the same or the opposite direction.The efficiency of the alerting, orienting, and executive networks was estimated by measuring how reaction time was influenced by congruency between temporal, spatial, and flanker cues. We found that the control group only demonstrated significantly greater attention efficiency than FES patients in the executive attention network.FES patients are impaired in executive attention but not in alerting or orienting attention, suggesting that executive attention deficit may be a primary impairment during the progression of the disease.Schizophrenia is a mental illness affecting 1% of the world population and has severe deleterious effects on quality of life; mainly because symptoms begin at an early age and full recovery has not been achieved with current therapies [1]. Schizophrenia is characterized by multiple cognitive impairments including attention deficit [2]. Most psychosocial problems in schizophrenia are associated with cognitive deficiency [3-6].The majority of studies on cognition in schizophrenia involve heterogeneous samples of adults suffering from chronic schizophrenia with long histories of somatic treatments including electroconvulsive therapy. Thus, the nature of neurocognitive dysfunction is potentially confounded by the effects of age, clinical symptoms, illness duration and severity, and/or treatment. Over the past 15 to 20£¿years, however, there has been
%K Schizophrenia
%K First-episode
%K Attention
%K ANT
%K Executive
%K Cognitive
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-244X/12/154