Authors (including presenting author) :
Keung NY, Lee ML, So TY, Mang WH, Lee WK, Chin YM
Affiliation :
Occupational Therapy Department, Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital
Introduction :
Attention deficit causes significant disturbance in multiple life domains to people with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. (Luck & Gold, 2023) Attention training for these patients is warranted to facilitate them to resume their life roles and re-integrate into the community. As mental health service in Hong Kong has undergone deinstitutionalization throughout the years, the average length of stay of psychiatric in-patients has dropped. (Honyashiki et al., 2023) There is a need for more effective cognitive training to maximize the treatment outcomes before their discharge. Overseas studies showed that training with neurofeedback could significantly improve individuals’ ability in regulating their attention and behaviour, which brought new insights to the development of the advanced attention training program. (Kimura et al., 2024; Loriette et al., 2021; Matsuzaki et al., 2023) Neurofeedback technology and education of compensatory strategies were incorporated in the existing training to improve training effectiveness and enhance patients’ skills to manage attention deficits in daily lives before discharge.
Objectives :
1) To evaluate the effectiveness of applying neurofeedback technology to improve attention performance of in-patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders; and 2) to collect their responses regarding the newly designed attention training program.
Methodology :
12 in-patients with diagnosis of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders were recruited in this 3-week attention training program. They were randomly assigned to undergo neurofeedback training or existing computerized training. All individuals received 2-3 sessions of assigned training every week and attended weekly educational talks for compensatory training on daily life issues. Digit Span Test (DST) was used as the pre- and post-assessment.
Result & Outcome :
Independent sample t-test was used for data analysis. Neurofeedback training group showed greater change in the post-test. The improvement of neurofeedback training group in Digit Span Forward Sequence (p=0.024) and Digit Span Forward Span (p=0.004) were significantly different from that underwent existing computerized training. It showed that using neurofeedback aids in attention training than computerized training alone could bring more effective outcomes for patients. The patient satisfaction survey showed 90% of the participants were satisfied with the program design. For the qualitative feedback collected, patients expressed the compensatory strategies taught are easily applicable in different daily life and the program could strengthen their insight on their own attention performance.
Conclusion
The advanced attention training program with use of neurofeedback aids showed significant effectiveness in improving attention performance of in-patients with schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. It could provide new directions for future advancement of attention training to enhance efficiency for in-patient service. For further service improvement and generalization to other target users, a larger sample size is suggested.
