This Research Topic, consisting of 13 research and review articles, aimed to deepen our understanding of the brain-immune interaction mechanisms underlying cognitive dysfunction in psychiatric disorders and help to develop better integrative therapeutic approaches of the five human research articles, the study by Yang Z. et al. reported that patients with schizophrenia performed poorly compared to healthy controls in all the cognitive tasks in the repeatable battery for the assessment of neuropsychological status, which consists of 12 subtests measuring the cognitive domains of immediate memory, visuospatial/constructional, language, attention, and delayed memory (Randolph et al., 1998). In addition, patients with schizophrenia showed lower plasma GDF-11 (growth differentiation factor 11) relative to that in healthy controls. Moreover, there were significant negative correlations between GDF-11 level and the PANSS total score, positive symptoms score, negative symptoms score, or general psychopathological score in the patients, whereas plasma GDF-11 level was positively associated with the immediate memory and delayed memory. The results of this study added evidence associating GDF-11 to the cognitive impairments (CI) in schizophrenia patients thus linking this TGF-? superfamily member to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.
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