Efficacy of Wisconsin's Card Sorting Test Retraining on Cognitive Deficits in Patients with Schizophrenia: A Randomized Double Blind Controlled Study

Schizophrenia is an illness which causes multiple deficits in the area of social, personal, occupational and more importantly in cognition. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of WCST retraining on the domains of attention, vigilance, working memory in the persons with schizophrenia. The present study aimed to evaluate the efficacy of WCST retraining on the domains of attention, vigilance and working memory in patients with schizophrenia. A prospective, hospital-based, randomized, double blind controlled study was conducted on 34 patients with Schizophrenia having at least 5 years of formal education. divided in two groups (study group and Control group) by block randomization technique, were evaluated on PANSS, ESDST, and N-Back (Verbal) test (1- back and 2- back), to measure the baseline deficits in attention, vigilance and working memory respectively. The experimental group was given WCST retraining for Cognitive remediation and the control group was kept wait listed without any intervention. WCST retraining was done in the patients of the experimental group by the didactic method. Following the intervention, the attention, vigilance and working memory were reevaluated. Results reveals that there were no significant differences between the groups in ESDST scores. In the N-back test (1-back), at baseline itself, there was highly significant difference between the two groups in the Hits score (p= 0.001), and this difference was maintained between the groups (p=0.000), even after WCST training. In N-back test (2-back) there was no significant between the group difference in the total error score at baseline but following WCST training statistically significant difference (p=0.048) was observed in the total error score between the two groups. The didactic method of WCST retraining in patients with schizophrenia was found to produce statistically significant improvement in verbal working memory but not on the measures of attention and vigilance.