Pharmacopsychiatry 2005; 38 - A177
DOI: 10.1055/s-2005-918799

The ANT as a potential neurocognitive endophenotype of schizophrenia

C Opgen-Rhein 1, A Neuhaus 2, C Urbanek 3, N Wieseke 3, E Hahn 3, S Strathmann 3, M Dettling 3
  • 1Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin
  • 2Klinik und Hochschulambulanz für Psychiatrie, Charité Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Berlin
  • 3Charité-Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Klinik für Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie, Charité Campus Mitte, Berlin

Aims: Increasingly, schizophrenia research gains a new focus on identification of endophenotypes which are presumably closer related to the neurodevelopmental basis of schizophrenia than the heterogenous clinical phenotypes as defined by diagnostic criteria. Among other cognitive tests, we investigated the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan et al., 2002) as a potential neurocognitive endophenotype of schizophrenia. Methods: Nine patients with schizophrenia and nine healthy controls matched for age, gender, and education were investigated. Using a cued detection paradigm, the ANT evaluates attentional functions by subtracting different reaction times after varying cue and target conditions. Results: Overall mean reaction time in patients (714 ms) differed highly significantly (p<.001) from controls (630 ms). However, the conflict effect was found to be more pronounced in controls (109 ms) compared to patients (61 ms, p<.1). Conclusions: To our knowledge this is the first examination of schizophrenic patients by means of the ANT. As expected, patients needed longer reaction times than controls in all trial conditions. Surprisingly patients seem to have a smaller conflict-effect in the ANT compared to controls. This may be due to a facilitation of congruent tasks which has been described for schizophrenic patients performing the Stroop task (Henik & Salo, 2004). These data yield promising results and should be verified with greater sample sizes in further investigations.