Neuropsychological frontal impairments and negative symptoms in schizophrenia

MARTINO D.J., BUCAY D., BUTMAN J.T., ALLEGRI R.F.

PSYCHIATRY RESEARCH

Elsevier/North-Holland Biomedical Press.

Lugar: Amsterdam; Año: 2007 vol. 152 p. 121 - 128

0165-1781

Negative symptoms have been associated to frontal lobe dysfunction in schizophrenia. However, neuropsychological studies that evaluated the correlation between performance in sensitive tests to the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and negative symptoms showed controversial results. During last years, growing evidence has appeared that, not only the DLPFC but other prefrontal regions could be involved in schizophrenia. We evaluated schizophrenic patients and healthy controls using three “frontal tests”: Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST), Iowa Gambling Task (GT) and a Theory of Mind test (Faux Pas), and studied the relationship between performance in these tests and negative symptomatology. Schizophrenic patients had worse performance than normal controls in WCST, GT and Faux Pas test. The severity of the negative symptoms showed a moderate to high correlation with performance in the Faux Pas test. Our findings support the idea that different prefrontal regions could be affected in people with schizophrenia and that the damage of each of these regions could be, at least in part, independent of the damage of the others. Some negative symptoms could be associated to frontal medial cortex dysfunction.