Tuesday, August 12, 2003

Schizophrenia could cause patients to forget their medication
BioMed Central press release at EurekAlert - "Patients with schizophrenia must take medication regularly to reduce their risk of relapse. But the disease impairs memory, according to an article published in BMC Psychiatry, meaning these patients may have difficulty in remembering to take their tablets. Habitual tasks, like taking medicine every few hours, rely on 'prospective memory'. This type of memory, which appears to be impaired by schizophrenia, enables you to remember that you have to do something in the future, without being prompted. Brita Elvevåg, from the Clinical Brain Disorders Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health and her colleagues who carried out the research, wrote: 'To our knowledge this is the first study to show that schizophrenia is associated with an overall impairment in habitual prospective memory performance.'"