Are cholinergic enhancers beneficial for memory in schizophrenia? An event-related potentials (ERPs) study of rivastigmine add-on therapy in a crossover trial

Cholinesterase Inhibitors as Adjunctive Therapy in Patients with Schizophrenia and Schizoaffective Disorder

“…Positive symptoms from PANSS were evaluated, and the analysis of heterogeneity of results of seven studies (n = 364) [33,35,37,39,41,45,48] was shown to be homogeneous. Symptoms were significantly more intense (28.2%, p = 0.010) in the group that received a cholinesterase inhibitor than in the group that received placebo.…”

“…To evaluate the clinical global impression before and after treatment, the Clinical Global Impression-Improvement (CGI-I) scale was used in eight studies, [31,33,39,41,43,45,48,49] but the mean and standard deviation were not described. Clinical global improvement was not found in any of these studies.…”

“…These consisted of 2 literature reviews, 2 metaanalyses and 17 studies (6 open-label studies [table I] and 11 double-blind trials that did not meet the inclusion criteria or did not present sufficient information [table III]). Thirteen studies [33,[35][36][37]39,41,[44][45][46][48][49]51,53] were included in the meta-analysis, including four crossover design trials (table IV). [33,35,41,44] …”

“…Twenty-four double-blind studies were found (table II): 5 with rivastigmine, [37,39,41,46,50] 13 with donepezil [31,[33][34][35][36]38,40,[43][44][45][47][48]52] and 6 with galantamine. [32,42,49,51,53,54] Fifteen of these studies did not show an improvement in cognition in schizophrenia, [31,[33][34][35][36][37][39][40][45][46]48,50,[52][53][54] six found cognitive improvement [32,[41][42][43]49,51] and three [38,44,47] found improvement in psychopathology.…”

Pharmacological Strategies for Enhancing Cognition in Schizophrenia

“…As shown in Table 2, an early open-label study did provide evidence of improvement in memory function among individuals with schizophrenia taking rivastigmine (Lenzi et al 2003), and two early 12-week, double-blind, parallel group studies provided some trend-level evidence for improved memory and executive control, as well as altered functional brain activity during cognitive task performance in individuals with schizophrenia (Aasen et al 2005;Kumari et al 2006). However, three subsequent 24-week double-blind studies did not provide any evidence for cognitive enhancement on any working memory, longterm memory, executive or speed measures (Chouinard et al 2007;Guillem et al 2006;Sharma et al 2006).…”