MEMORY GAME IN IPAD HELPS PEOPLE WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA

Αυτή η ανάρτηση είναι επίσης διαθέσιμη στο: Greek

The “education” of the brain promises a game for the iPad,which has developed in Britain. It can improve the memory of patients suffering from schizophrenia, helping them in their daily lives at home and at work, said researchers at the University of Cambridge.
They pointed out that tests on a small number of patients, who have played this game for four weeks, showed that they improved memory and learning.

The game «Wizard» is designed to help the so-called episodic memory, the type of memory that we need to remember for example where we left our keys several hours after or to remember some hours later where we parked our car in a multi-storey car park.

Schizophrenia is a long-term condition of mental health which causes series of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behavior by hallucinating and fallacies.

While some psychotic symptoms can be dealt satisfactorily with medication, some patients often continue to have problems with weakened function of memory and understanding with the result that it is not possible to return to work or to continue their studies.

There are more and more indications that the training with the help of computers can help people with schizophrenia to overcome some of the symptoms, with better results in their daily lives.

In this study, which was published in the magazine Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society B, 22 patients who have played the memory game made significantly fewer errors and it took considerably less effort to remember where were different patterns in specific tests.

They also improved their performance on the scale of the overall valuation Function (crimp-on sleeves) which is used by doctors to assess the social, occupational and psychological functioning of adults.

Another important finding from the study is that patients also said that they enjoyed the game and wanted to play it during the 8 hours knowledge education. The researchers have said that this is important, because the lack of incentive is a common feature of schizophrenic.

“We need a way of treating cognitive symptoms of schizophrenic, like the problems with the building memory, but progress toward the development of pharmaceutical care is slow,” said Barbara Sahakian from the psychiatric Department of Cambridge University.

“The study shows that the memory game can help where the medicines have failed. (And) because the game is interesting, even those players with a general lack an incentive to continue the training”.

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