Authors (including presenting author) :
Au RWC(1), Sezto HNW(1), Lam VWM(2), Wan YT(3), Poon LT(3), Wong JKK(1), Pang PF(3)
Affiliation :
(1) Occupational Therapy Department, United Christian Hospital, Hospital Authority,
(2) Department of Rehabilitation Science, Faculty of Health and Social Science, Hong Kong Polytechnic University,
(3) Department of Psychiatry, United Christian Hospital, Hospital Authority.
Introduction :
People with schizophrenia or depression have prospective memory (PM) deficits, which affect their daily living. Given the paucity of research into training to correct PM deficits, we subjected a group of participants to a Chinese version of the PM module of the Cognitive Compensatory Training (CCT-C-PM) intervention to study its effect on their PM performance.
Objectives :
We applied the CCT-C-PM in cohorts of participants with schizophrenia or depression and investigated its effectiveness to improve their PM. We hypothesized that the patients who underwent CCT-C-PM training would exhibit improved PM performance relative to those who did not, and that this improvement would occur in one or more of the subtypes of PM.
Methodology :
We randomized two diagnostic cohorts (schizophrenia and depression) into control groups (occupational therapy only) or experimental groups (CCT-C-PM and occupational therapy). The schizophrenia cohort had 17 participants in its control group and 23 participants in its experimental group. The depression cohort had 10 participants in its control group and 12 participants in its experimental group. Their symptoms and PM performances were measured at baseline and after treatment (after the completion of the CCT-C-PM intervention in the experimental group and the same timeframe in the control group). The treatment effects were examined by a repeated measure analysis of variance/analysis of covariance and a Scheffé test. The effect sizes (Cohen’s d) of treatments against the controls were also calculated.
Result & Outcome :
There was no difference between the experimental and control groups in either cohort in terms of sociodemographic data, symptoms, and PM measures at baseline. The sex combination differed across the groups in the depression cohort. We found that the CCT-C-PM improved PM, especially event-based PM, for which large effect sizes were seen. The effect on time-based PM was unclear and requires future study. Our findings suggest that the CCT-C-PM is a viable training method for improving PM.
