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Cognitive symptoms of psychosis: aetiology, neurobiology, & treatment

Published on June 30, 2024   28 min

A selection of talks on Neuroscience

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0:00
Hello, My name is Robert McCutcheon and I'm a Psychiatrist and a Researcher. In both my clinical and my academic work, I'm really interested in the cognitive symptoms of psychosis and that's what I'm going to be talking about today.
0:22
I'm going to start by really discussing what the problem is. Then I'm going to discuss how this problem arises. What are the causative factors beneath cognitive impairment in psychosis? Then finally, I'm going to think about how we go around addressing this. What are the potential clinical interventions that we can make to treat cognitive symptoms in psychosis?
0:53
Why is it worth thinking about this? First of all, it's highly prevalent. The graph shows a distribution of cognitive scores. You can see the control population in blue and the people with schizophrenia in orange. You can see that there's really a quite profound shift in the performance on cognitive tests compared to the control population. Of course, if it was highly prevalent but of no consequence, we wouldn't mind that much. The reason we mind is because it has a really major impact on functioning. Cognitive symptoms are really one of the main reasons why people with psychosis aren't able to reach their full potential, and contributes to unemployment and inability to live independently. The other reason is because we don't currently have good treatments for this. The standard dopamine-blocking agents we use are effective for hallucinations and delusions but really don't have much benefit, and can at times even be harmful when it comes to cognitive symptoms.

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Cognitive symptoms of psychosis: aetiology, neurobiology, & treatment

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