Comment on: Neurocognitive Functioning in Schizophrenia, Their Unaffected Siblings and Healthy Controls: A Comparison.

Sir,

The bears reference to the study titled “neurocognitive functioning in schizophrenia, their unaffected siblings and healthy controls: A comparison” by Nehra et al. 2016, published in Indian Journal of Psychological Medicine.[1] This is an interesting study which explored the area of neurocognitive functions in schizophrenia patients. Despite small sample size of twenty patients in each group, rigorous inclusion and exclusion criterion, strong methodology including the selection of tools used for assessment of cognitive functions and analysis in each subgroup and their comparison in this study produce valuable results.

I would like to draw the attention of authors to the finding mentioned in abstract of study “However, when compared with patients with schizophrenia, unaffected siblings performed poorly on the tests of executive functions, visual memory, verbal memory, psychomotor speed, concentration, and graphomotor abilities.” Later on, authors mention in a study about results of the comparison of healthy control with both schizophrenia patients and their unaffected siblings, but it seems that this issue “comparison of schizophrenia patient with unaffected sibling” has not been discussed further. More ever, finding of “patients with schizophrenia performed significantly worse than the healthy controls and also the unaffected siblings on some of the subtests of Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Brief Visuospatial Memory Test-Revised, Hopkins Verbal Learning Test-Revised and Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale Digit Symbol Test” is also not in agreement with the finding mentioned in abstract.

Thanks

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