A group of scientists say they have found evidence that conditions involving hearing voices or hallucinations, such as schizophrenia, may improve when patients play specially designed computer games.
The head of the research team, Dr Sophia Vinogradov of the University of California, says that current drugs for schizophrenia ease the symptoms but do not fix the thinking problems that are a central part of the disability caused by the illness.
The researchers are now studying how much computer-based brain training can help in schizophrenia.
The idea comes from decades of research showing that people with schizophrenia have rigid nerve pathways that limit the flexibility of thinking, and that these limited pathways can be improved with particular tasks and exercises. Brain exercises may therefore help patients with schizophrenia who have problems with memory, attention and reasoning.
After studying several computer training programmes over a number of years, the team found that the best treatment for schizophrenia was 50 hours of training over 10 weeks. Patients who followed this programme improved much more than those who did not. The intensity of the programme may vary in future depending on how long patients have been ill, but current results say that more training means more benefit.
In one step, the researchers compared patients who played ordinary computer games not designed to treat their condition, and found they did not improve as much as patients who played the games designed for treatment.
The researchers then ran a larger trial using medical devices approved by the US Food and Drug Administration.
The company that makes the brain-training software says computer-based treatment can be used at home or in clinics. It currently supplies the programme to research teams such as the one at the University of California, and expects the approach to have wide uses beyond schizophrenia.
The company adds that the complex changes that happen in the brain as a result of training lead to recovery because the brain corrects itself, a natural method, if it can be called that, because it uses no chemicals.
Psychiatrists say the treatment relies heavily on the brain's plasticity, its ability to repair itself by building new nerve pathways in place of faulty ones, in response to specially designed computer programmes.
Computer-based therapy is a new kind of treatment that is expected to spread to various neurological and psychiatric conditions, such as autism, and even depression and anxiety.
Like
Love
Angry
Dislike
