Cognition, drug treatment, and functional outcome in schizophrenia: a tale of two transitions.

摘要

A second key transition is that we are less comfortable with pinning our hopes on an-tipsychotic medications as a way to achieve cognitive improvement. Optimism that second-generation antipsychotics would yield cognitive improvements has progressively been tempered as treatment effect sizes have progressively dwindled, possibly as a result of dosing factors (as doses of comparators became lower} or patient selection factors (as more patients received second-generation medications). At any rate, the high hopes for beneficial cognitive effects from antipsychotic medications are now hanging by threads. The article in this issue by Keefe et al., along with the cognitive results from the Clinical Antipsychotic Trials of Intervention Effectiveness (CATIE) study (5), will sever some of the remaining threads.