NCT05496413

Investigating the Cognitive Source of Visual Working Memory Impairment in Schizophrenia

• Status: Completed
• Phase: N/A
• Study type: Interventional
• Enrollment: 31 (actual)
• Sponsor: Taipei Medical University Shuang Ho Hospital · Academic / Other
• Sex: All
• Age: 20 Years – 65 Years
• Healthy volunteers: Not accepted

Summary

The investigators plan to investigate the effect of enhancement on visual working memory (VWM) in patients of chronic schizophrenia and determine the predictive factors of effective treatment.

Detailed description

Schizophrenia is a complex neuro-psychiatric disorder that affects a significant portion of total population worldwide. The disease impairs multiple aspects of human cognition, of which visual working memory (VWM) impairment is known to be one of the pivotal cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenic patients. Despite of several attempts that have been made to establish competent treatment strategies to impede cognitive dysfunction of schizophrenia, till date no such studies exhibited satisfactory outcomes. In this context, numbers of studies have been carried out to utilize transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) as a treatment option to enhance working memory deficit in various neuropsychiatric populations, but with very limited success. To this end, the present proposal will focus on the use of transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS) to better target the oscillatory mechanisms underlying VWM. Our specific aims are twofold, namely, 1) Does DLPFC tACS work on schizophrenic patients in terms of VWM improvement, and 2) how is tACS facilitating patients' VWM? This is because VWM deficit can be caused by poor encoding, poor maintenance, or poor retrieval (or any combination between them). Failure at any of those steps will make the patients appear to have poor VWM from clinical observation, but the cognitive process that is impaired may not be the same across populations.

Conditions

• Memory Deficits Schizophrenia Neurostimulator; Complications

Interventions

Type	Name	Description
DEVICE	STARSTIM	In order to evaluate the working memory ability of schizophrenic participants, a task was designed that needs to be performed by them. Firstly, a stimulus of six different color circles of same size in a gray background would be given for 500ms. This would be followed by 2000ms delay phase and then a test array would be appeared. The test array would be exactly same to the stimulus array but with or without change in color of only one circle. The test array would appear on the screen till the participants record their response and they would be asked to respond if the test array matches to the stimulus or not.

Timeline

• Start date: 2022-08-11
• Primary completion: 2023-09-12
• Completion: 2023-09-25
• First posted: 2022-08-11
• Last updated: 2024-10-01

Locations

1 site across 1 country: Taiwan