Long-term treatment with clozapine and verbal memory performance in schizophrenia

Abstract

Clozapine is more efficacious than first-generation antipsychotics for positive and negative symptoms, although it is related with serious adverse effects. Because of this profile, it could also have an impact on cognition. Therefore, we evaluated learning ability of 31 treatment-resistant individuals with SZ using clozapine uninterruptedly for 18.23 ± 4.71 years and 26 non-treatment-resistant using other antipsychotics that never used clozapine. Long-term treatment with clozapine did not improve verbal learning ability better than other antipsychotics. Although clozapine has a unique profile for reducing clinical symptoms, it may not have an additional benefit for cognition when started later on the course of schizophrenia.

Autistic traits and cognitive profiles of treatment-resistant schizophrenia

“…For other neurocognitive domains, the patients treated with CLZ tended to present a poor cognitive performance, although this did not reach significance. These results may indicate that our TRS patients did not overcome their neurocognitive impairments even with the introduction of CLZ, and this possibility is consistent with some other reports showing lesser advantage in cognitive improvement with CLZ treatment ( Czepielewski et al, 2018 ; Nielsen et al, 2015 ). This result might indicate that our TRS group had some patients with quite severe TRS, whose cognitive deficits would have been unlikely to respond to even CLZ.…”

Methamphetamine-induced locomotor sensitization in mice is not associated with deficits in a range of cognitive, affective and social behaviours: interaction with brain-derived neurotrophic factor Val66Met genotype

“…Cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia have the highest impact on daily functioning (Zaragoza Domingo et al , 2015; Harvey et al , 2022). Additionally, current drug treatments for schizophrenia are not effective against cognitive symptoms and may actually contribute to the cognitive deficits (Czepielewski et al , 2018; Harvey et al , 2022). However, there is limited understanding of the neurobiological basis of any such behavioural deficits.…”