A "brain training" iPad game developed in Britain may improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia, researchers from the University of Cambridge said Monday.
The game, "Wizard," is the result of a nine-month collaboration between psychologists, neuroscientists, brainbow (the developers of "Peak") and people with schizophrenia, according to the University of Cambridge. The objective of the game is to improve the player's episodic memory - the type of memory associated with remembering miscellaneous events throughout the day, such as where you left your keys or where you parked your car.
Schizophrenia is defined as a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behavior to hallucinations and delusions.
In a study published today in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, a team of researchers led by Professor Barbara Sahakian from the Department of Psychiatry at Cambridge went into the details of their test.
The researchers assigned 22 participants who had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia to either the cognitive training group or a control group at random. Members of the training group played the game for a total of eight hours over a four-week period, while members of the control group continued their regular treatment.
After the test period, the researchers tested all participants' episodic memory using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) PAL. They found that patients who played "Wizard" made significantly fewer errors and needed significantly fewer attempts to remember the location of different patterns in the test relative to the control group, according to Fox News.
Those patients also improved their scores on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale, which is used by doctors to rate the social, occupational and psychological functioning of adults.
One challenge that the app development team faced was designing "Wizard" in a way that would help patients while still being fun. They feel they completed this task since they note that patients reported enjoying the game and were motivated to play it across the eight hours of cognitive training. This is important because those diagnosed with schizophrenia frequently exhibit a lack of motivation.
Professor Sahakian notes that the test's results are significant because the app made progress where drugs have failed.
"We need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory, but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment. So this proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed," Sahakian said according to the Guardian.
"Because the game is interesting, even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training," she concluded.
The collaboration between brainbow and the University of Cambridge has produced a memory game called the Cambridge University & Peak Advanced Training Plan, which is available now in Peak's iOS app.
