New app shows promise in helping to treat schizophrenia

UK researchers have developed an interactive tablet game that could help people with schizophrenia to manage their condition better.

The iPad brain training app was developed and tested by researchers at the University of Cambridge and has been shown to potentially improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia, helping them in their daily lives at work and living independently.

Dubbed Wizard, the game aims to improve an individual's episodic memory, one of the facets of cognitive functioning most affected in patients with schizophrenia.

Patients who had played the memory game made significantly fewer errors and needed significantly fewer attempts to remember the location of different patterns in a subsequent test, while also showing improvements on a scale measuring their overall functionality.

Professor Peter Jones adds: "We hope that, used in conjunction with medication and current psychological therapies, this could help people with schizophrenia minimise the impact of their illness on everyday life."

Schizophrenia is a long-term mental health condition that causes several psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behaviour through to hallucinations and delusions.