Due to the decline of social function, the quality of life of patients with chronic schizophrenia has seriously declined, causing enormous harm to patients, families, and society. The global incidence rate of schizophrenia is 1% to 1.5%, with over 23 million worldwide and nearly 7 million patients in China suffering from schizophrenia. As a result, huge medical expenses are incurred every year, causing a huge economic burden on patient families and society. Cognitive impairment is a core symptom of schizophrenia, an effective indicator for predicting disease development, treatment response, and functional level, as well as a reliable indicator for reflecting prognosis and quality of life. Schizophrenia patients may have more cognitive impairment, such as severe disorders in visual spatial processing, attention/alertness, working memory, work fluency, and executive ability. Cognitive dysfunction already exists before the first onset of schizophrenia and persists for a long time. Even after the remission of other psychiatric symptoms, there is a similar degree of cognitive impairment . How to standardize the assessment of cognitive function in schizophrenia and use it as a basis for clinical intervention has increasingly attracted the attention of researchers.
Author(s) Details:
Hou Yongmei,
Department of Psychology, School of Humanities and Management, Guangdong Medical University, Dongguan, Guangdong Province, China.
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