Neurocognitive effects of atypical antipsychotics in patients with first-episode schizophrenia

Abstract

Introduction: Cognitive impairment is a core feature of schizophrenia. The effects of atypical antipsychotics on the cognitive functions of patients with first-episode schizophrenia have not been comprehensively investigated so far. This study aims to compare neurocognitive effects of risperidone, olanzapine, and aripiprazole for first-episode schizophrenia.

Methods: The study was a multicenter, randomized, open-label clinical trial. 546 patients were randomly divided into three medication groups, and followed up for 1 year. Cognitive performance was evaluated with a neuropsychological test battery. The Clinical trials.gov ID of the study is NCT01057849.

Results: At 6 months, treatment resulted in significant improvements in all three groups in most cognitive domains except verbal learning and memory. At 12 months, three treatment groups had further improvements in three cognitive domains, but visual learning and memory performance dropped back to baseline.

Conclusion: All three atypical antipsychotics tested in the study can potentially improve cognitive performance in first-episode schizophrenia, but no significant difference in the degree of improvement was found between drugs.

Keywords:

• Neurocognitive function
• atypical antipsychotics
• first-episode schizophrenia

Acknowledgements

We thank all the staff in six study sites that were involved in organizing and recruiting samples as well as all the subjects providing the neurobehavioral data to our study.

Disclosure statement

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes on contributors

Yanyan Hou performed the statistical analysis, and drafted the manuscript. Jiaheng Xie performed the statistical analyses. Yanbo Yuan, Zhang Cheng, Xue Han and Lei Yang were principal investigators for recruitment. Xin Yu and Chuan Shi provided critical contribution and review of the manuscript and Xin Yu conceived and designed the trial. All authors read and approved the manuscript

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFC1314200),the Key Program of Beijing Science and Technology Commission under Grant No. D171100007017002; the National Key Project of Scientific and Technical Supporting Programs from the Ministry of Science & Technology of China under Grant No. 2007BAI17B04. AQ1v