Schizophrenia Could
Cause Patients to Forget Their Medications
Patients with schizophrenia must take
antipsychotic 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 medications. 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.
Full Article
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 (BioMed Central), 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".
The authors hypothesised that patients with schizophrenia would have
problems with tasks requiring prospective memory. They might mistake
remembering they have to do something with remembering they've actually done
it. Their hypothesis stemmed from the theory that people with schizophrenia
confuse real and imagined events.
To test their hypothesis the researchers, based at NIMH and the University
of Warwick, compared the prospective memory of people with and without the
disease. In each test participants manoeuvred a ball around an obstacle course
for 90 seconds. They were asked to turn over a counter when they were at least
25 seconds into the test. The time delay ensured that prospective memory had to
be used. Participants with schizophrenia were more likely to forget to turn
over the counter.
At the end of the test the participants were asked if they had remembered to
turn over the counter. Approximately a third of the time participants with
schizophrenia reported they had done so when they had not.
Elvevåg and colleagues wrote: "This would seem a worryingly high
probability for such an apparently simple task that posed few problems for
control participants. […] Our result suggests that patients' self-reports
of having completed a habitual prospective memory task, for example taking
medication, are likely to be particularly unreliable".
Schizophrenia affects one in every hundred people at some point during their
lives. While there is no cure, it is
treatable with antipsychotic
drugs. About 80 percent of those patients who stop taking their medications
after an acute episode of schizophrenia will have a relapse within a year.
Source: BioMed Central Psychiatry
Editor's Note: There is a simple solution to this, used by St
George's Hospital, Morpeth, U.K. They have these little packs called
"dosettes" which contain enough medication for a week. Each dosette
has 7 little daily "fingers" which can easily be slipped into a
pocket. The finger has compartments for meds at breakfast, lunch, dinner and
bedtime. If the patient wants to check if they've taken their medication then
all they have to do is look at their dosette finger. To reduce the risk of
confusion, each dosette finger is labelled with a day name. The system works
and is simple.
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