Effects Of Clozapine And Risperidone On Social Cognition In Schizophrenia Patiens

Objective Schizophrenia is a common and complex mental illness, which havedeficits of social cognition, including primarily emotion cognition, eye basic emotiondiscrimination and faux pas recognition. Neural basis of social cognition involvesprefrontal cortex, orbital frontal cortex and cingulate gyrus, and schizophrenia patientshave structural or functional impairment in these brain regions. Previous researcheshave found that clozapine and risperidone improved social cognition in schizophreniapatients, however, results were inconsistent. The aim of the current study was toinvestigate social cognition assessed by the eye basic emotion discrimination task andfaux pas recognition task, and to compare the effects of clozapine and risperidone onsocial cognition in schizophrenia patients.Methods Sixty-six patients who met a DSM-IV diagnosis for schizophrenia andthirty-two healthy control group subjects matched for age, gender, education wereincluded in the study. The66cases of schizophrenia were randomly divided into twogroup: clozapine group (n=34) and risperidone group (n=32). Before the treatment,all subjects were assessed by a neuropsychological test battery, including mini-mentalstate examination (MMSE), verbal fluency (VF) and digit span (DS); schizophreniapatients were assessed by the positive and negative syndrome scal (PANSS) before andafter treatment; all subjects were assessed by the eye basic emotion discrimination taskand faux pas recognition task before and after treatment.Results Schizophrenia patients performed significantly poorer in faux pasrecognition task (question1, question2, question3, question4, all P<0.05) and eye basic emotion discrimination task (happy, surprise, fear, sad, disgust, anger, all P<0.05) thancontrols before treatment. Particularly, patients in clozapine group did worse indiscrimination of fear and disgust (P<0.01), and patients in risperidone group didworse in discrimination of surprise and fear (P<0.01). After treatment, performance onfaux pas recognition task in patients improved, however, patients in clozapine groupperformed significantly poorer in question1, question3, question4(all P<0.05) andpatients in risperidone group performed significantly poorer in question2, question3,question4(all P<0.05). Performance on eye basic emotion discrimination task inpatients improved, however, patients in clozapine group performed significantly poorerin discrimination of fear, disgust and anger (all P<0.05) and patients in risperidonegroup performed significantly poorer in discrimination of surprise, fear and disgust (allP<0.05).Conclusion The results confirm that schizophrenics have deficits of social cognitionand impairments of social cognition are trait change in schizophrenia patients. Effectsof clozapine and risperidone on social cognition demonstrate in different respects.