April 01, 2016
Ambient Noise May Exacerbate Cognitive Deficits in Schizophrenia
Reducing exposure to environmental noise may provide cognitive benefit in individuals with schizophrenia
Loud or distracting levels of environmental noise may negatively affect cognitive functioning in patients with schizophrenia, suggests a new study in Schizophrenia Research. “Although there was little evidence that schizophrenia patients are more affected by noise than their healthy counterparts, environmental noise worsened their pre-existing cognitive deficits, particularly in the verbal memory domain,” the researchers wrote. “Cognitive assessment of clinical groups on noisy wards may lead to over-estimation of cognitive deficits in domains that are sensitive to noise.”