Publications (127) View all
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Article: Clinical, functional, and intertask correlations of measures developed by the Cognitive Neuroscience Test Reliability and Clinical Applications for Schizophrenia Consortium.
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ABSTRACT: The goal of the Cognitive Neuroscience Test Reliability and Clinical Applications for Schizophrenia (CNTRACS) Consortium was to develop measures of discrete cognitive processes, allowing for the interpretation of specific deficits that could be linked to specific neural systems. Here we report on the intertask, clinical, and functional correlates of the 4 tasks that were investigated in large groups of patients with schizophrenia (>100) and healthy controls (>73) at 5 sites across the United States. In both healthy and patient groups, the key dependent measures from the CNTRACS tasks were minimally intercorrelated, suggesting that they are measuring discrete abilities. Correlations were examined between CNTRACS tasks and measures of functional capacity, premorbid IQ, symptom severity, and level of community functioning. Performance on tasks measuring relational memory encoding, goal maintenance, and visual gain control were correlated with premorbid IQ and the former 2 tasks with the functional capacity. Goal maintenance task performance was negatively correlated with negative symptom severity and informant reports of community function. These correlations reflect the relationship of specific abilities with functional outcome. They are somewhat lower than functional outcome correlations observed with conventional neuropsychological tests that confound multiple cognitive and motivational deficits. The measures of visual integration and gain control were not significantly correlated with clinical symptoms or function. These results suggest that the CNTRACS tasks measure discrete cognitive abilities, some of which relate to aspects of functional capacity/outcome in schizophrenia.Schizophrenia Bulletin 11/2011; 38(1):144-52. · 8.80 Impact Factor -
Article: Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia II: developing imaging biomarkers to enhance treatment development for schizophrenia and related disorders.
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ABSTRACT: The Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative, funded by an R13 from the National Institute of Mental Health, seeks to enhance translational research in treatment development for impaired cognition in schizophrenia by developing tools from cognitive neuroscience into useful measures of treatment effects on behavior and brain function. An initial series of meetings focused on the selection of a new set of tasks from cognitive neuroscience for the measurement of treatment effects on specific cognitive and neural systems. Subsequent validation and optimization studies are underway and a subset of validated measures with well-characterized psychometric properties will be generally available in 2011. This article describes results of the first meeting of the second phase of the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia, which seeks to develop imaging biomarkers and improved animal models to enhance translational research. In this meeting, we considered issues related to the use of methods such as functional magnetic resonance imaging, electroencephalography, magnetoencephalography, and transcranial magnetic simulation as biomarkers for treatment development. We explored the biological nature of the signals measured by each method, their validity and reliability as measures of cognition-related neural activity, potential confounds related to drug effects on the signal of interest, and conceptual, methodological, and pragmatic issues related to their use in preclinical, first into human, and multicenter phase II and III studies. This overview article describes the background and goals of the meeting together with a summary of the major issues discussed in more detail in the accompanying articles appearing in this issue of Biological Psychiatry.Biological psychiatry 07/2011; 70(1):7-12. · 8.93 Impact Factor -
Article: Selecting paradigms from cognitive neuroscience for translation into use in clinical trials: proceedings of the third CNTRICS meeting.
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ABSTRACT: This overview describes the goals and objectives of the third conference conducted as part of the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative. This third conference was focused on selecting specific paradigms from cognitive neuroscience that measured the constructs identified in the first CNTRICS meeting, with the goal of facilitating the translation of these paradigms into use in clinical trials contexts. To identify such paradigms, we had an open nomination process in which the field was asked to nominate potentially relevant paradigms and to provide information on several domains relevant to selecting the most promising tasks for each construct (eg, construct validity, neural bases, psychometrics, availability of animal models). Our goal was to identify 1-2 promising tasks for each of the 11 constructs identified at the first CNTRICS meeting. In this overview article, we describe the on-line survey used to generate nominations for promising tasks, the criteria that were used to select the tasks, the rationale behind the criteria, and the ways in which breakout groups worked together to identify the most promising tasks from among those nominated. This article serves as an introduction to the set of 6 articles included in this special issue that provide information about the specific tasks discussed and selected for the constructs from each of 6 broad domains (working memory, executive control, attention, long-term memory, perception, and social cognition).Schizophrenia Bulletin 12/2008; 35(1):109-14. · 8.80 Impact Factor -
Article: Diagnosis and distress in Navajo healing.
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ABSTRACT: In contemporary Navajo society, traditional Navajo ceremonies, Native American Church prayer meetings, and Navajo Christian faith healing are all highly sought-after resources in the everyday pursuit of health and well-being. What is the nature of affliction among patients who turn to such forms of religious healing? Are these patients typically afflicted with psychiatric disorder? In this article we discuss 84 Navajo patients who participated in the Navajo Healing Project during a period in which they consulted one of these forms of healing. We present diagnostic results obtained from the Structured Clinical Interview for DSMIV (SCID) administered to these patients. We then present an ethnographically augmented analysis comparing the research diagnosis obtained via the SCID with a clinical diagnosis, with the diagnosis given by religious healers, and with the understanding of their own distress on the part of patients. These analyses demonstrate how a cultural approach contributes to the basic science and clinical understandings of affliction as well as to discussion of the advantages and limitations of DSM categories as descriptors of distress and disorder.The Journal of nervous and mental disease 09/2008; 196(8):585-96. · 1.77 Impact Factor -
Article: Identifying cognitive mechanisms targeted for treatment development in schizophrenia: an overview of the first meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia Initiative.
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ABSTRACT: This overview describes the generation and development of the ideas that led to the Cognitive Neuroscience Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (CNTRICS) initiative. It also describes the organization, process, and products of the first meeting. The CNTRICS initiative involves a series of three conferences that will systematically address barriers to translating paradigms developed in the basic animal and human cognitive neuroscience fields for use in translational research aimed at developing novel treatments for cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. The articles in this special section report on the results of the first conference, which used a criterion-based consensus-building process to develop a set of cognitive constructs to be targeted for translation efforts.Biological psychiatry 08/2008; 64(1):4-10. · 8.93 Impact Factor
