ECT Improves Auditory Mismatch Negativity in Patients With Schizophrenia: New Study From China

 Out on PubMed, from researchers in China and the US, is this study:

Adjuvant electroconvulsive therapy with antipsychotics is associated with improvement in auditory mismatch negativity in schizophrenia.

Liu Y, Jia LN, Wu H, Jiang W, Wang Q, Wang D, Xiong YB, Ren YP, Ma X, Tang YL.Psychiatry Res. 2022 Feb 25;311:114484. doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2022.114484. Online ahead of print.PMID: 35245745 

The article is here.

And from the text:


The paper is well written and the methods seem quite solid; if auditory mismatch negativity is a real thing, then this is a real article. But the jargon meter is certainly off the scale...

So let's suspend disbelief for a moment and accept all the underlying premises; in that case, this is a very interesting study that shows ECT improves deficient baseline sensory (in this case, auditory) processing in schizophrenia, and improves cognition and psychopathology, with some correlations therein.  Could MMN be used as a biomarker for cognitive effects of ECT in depressed patients? We await further studies to elucidate this area of investigation...

I would be very interested in blog readers' opinions of this work, thanks. A full read will be ~ 20 minutes.




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