Vargas M L
Servico de Pisquiatría, Complejo Assistencial de Zamora, Zamora, España.
Rev Neurol. 2004;38(5):473-82.
Schizophrenia is a severely disability causing syndrome, what tend to chronically alter living project of great number of young people and its families. It is affected multiple cognitive functions, as executive capacity, explicit memory, working memory or perceptive integration. In the last years, neurocognitive rehabilitation techniques of this functions coming from the experience with brain damage patients has been applied to schizophrenia.
Present work revised: a). cognitive deficits that can be considered as nuclear in the genesis of schizophrenia symptoms and b). recovery or substitution strategies of that deficits, that can be generalized to a better psychosocial functioning of the patient. It is proposed that attention control deficit (ACD), defined as the inadequate assignation of attention recourses during cognitive processing, results in attention processing of redundant information and a lack of attention recourses to process new information. Some explaining models are presented for subjective and perceptive symptoms, language disorders and executive disorders in schizophrenia. Possibilities of neurocognitive rehabilitation in schizophrenia are discussed, especially by the utilisation of implicit learning methods, that don't need attention processing. Some recommendations are made for the implementation of cognitive rehabilitation in the general framework of psychosocial and occupational rehabilitation.
