Working Memory in Patients with Schizophrenia and Bipolar Affective Disorder: Quantitative or Qualitative Differences?

Background: Some authors suggest that working memory may underlie most of cognitive deficits found in schizophrenia and contribute to the most salient features of the disorder. Many authors further believe that, despite the differences in magnitude, profile of cognitive impairment is quite similar across schizophrenia and affective psychosis. To test the hypothesis of profile similarity between SCZ and BPD compared to healthy individuals, we carried out a comparative study applying several working memory tasks.

A validation study of appropriate phonological verbal fluency stimulus letters for use with croatian speaking individuals.

The aim of this study is to determine the word frequency for all thirty letters of the Croatian alphabet and to collect normative data for the letter fluency task in Croatian speakers. Ninety two healthy participants were given each of the Croatian letters, and asked to generate as many words as possible in 60 seconds for each letter Results suggested that participants generated most frequently words starting with the letters as follows: "K", "P", "S" and "M".

A preliminary study of the comparative effects of olanzapine and fluphenazine on cognition in schizophrenic patients.

The aim of the study was to compare the effect of olanzapine versus fluphenazine treatment on cognitive functioning. Eighteen schizophrenic outpatients, aged 25 - 61 (average 37 years), all meeting DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia, were included in the study. They were randomly assigned to 22 weeks of either olanzapine or fluphenazine treatment.