Zhongguo quanke yixue (Dec 2022)

Comparative Study of Cognitive Function in Inpatients with Generalized Anxiety Disorder and Healthy Controls

  • TANG Chong, ZENG Shufei, LIANG Hanwen, WANG Jiajia, ZOU Hui, CAI Lidan, ZHANG Bin

DOI
https://doi.org/10.12114/j.issn.1007-9572.2022.0481
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 25, no. 35
pp. 4399 – 4405

Abstract

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Background Generalized anxiety disorder is a common chronic psychiatric disorder, which leads to cognitive impairment and seriously affects the quality of life and social function of patients. Objective To compare the differences in cognitive function between GAD inpatients and healthy controls. Methods From August 2018 to January 2020, GAD patients hospitalized in Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University were selected as the GAD group (n=30) . At the same time, age- and gender-matched healthy volunteers were recruited from the escorts of inpatients in Nanfang Hospital, Southern Medical University as the healthy control group (n=30) . The Hamilton Anxiety Scale (HAMA) , Hamilton Depression Scale (HAMD) and Beck scale for suicide ideation-Chinese Version (BSI-CV) were used for psychological evaluation. Psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) , Go/No-go association task and N-back task were used to evaluate the cognitive function of attention, inhibition and working memory separately. The differences in general conditions, psychological characteristics, and cognitive function between two groups were compared. Multivariate Logistic regression analysis was further used to compare the differences in cognitive function between GAD inpatients and healthy controls. Results The total scores of HAMA and HAMD, the total scores of BSI-CV at the most severe condition and the proportion of the patients with suicidal ideation at the most severe condition in GAD group were higher than those in control group (P<0.05) . N-back task: the percentage of hitting targets at 1-back (NBACK1a) and 2-back (NBACK2a) in GAD group were both significantly lower than that in control group (P<0.05) ; the average reaction time of hitting targets at 1-back (NBACK1b) in GAD group was significantly longer than that in control group (P<0.05) . Multivariate Logistic regression analysis showed that NBACK1a〔OR=0.946, 95%CI (0.898, 0.997) , P=0.038〕and NBACK1b〔OR=1.007, 95%CI (1.000, 1.014) , P=0.042〕 were the influencing factors of GAD. Conclusion GAD inpatients perform worse than healthy controls mainly in working memory, which deserves more clinical attention.

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