Dataset Information

Acceptance and Efficacy of Metacognitive Training (MCT) on Positive Symptoms and Delusions in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Meta-analysis Taking Into Account Important Moderators.

ABSTRACT: Metacognitive training (MCT) is a new, widely used intervention for psychosis. The present meta-analysis examines the efficacy of MCT in schizophrenia. Fifteen studies comparing effects of MCT on positive symptoms, delusions or acceptance of MCT with a control group were included in this meta-analysis. These studies comprised a total of 408 patients in the MCT condition and 399 in the control condition. The moderating effects of masking of outcome assessment, randomization, incomplete outcome data, use of an active control intervention, and individual vs group MCT were investigated. Possible effects of sensitivity analyses and publication bias were also examined. The results show a significant overall effect of MCT for positive symptoms (g = -0.34, 95% CI [-0.53, -0.15]), delusions (g = -0.41, 95% CI [-0.74, -0.07]) and acceptance of the intervention (g = -0.84, 95% CI [-1.37, -0.31]). Using only studies being at low risk for bias regarding randomization, masking and incomplete outcome data reduced effect sizes for positive symptoms and delusions (g = -0.28, 95% CI [-0.50, -0.06] and g = -0.18, 95% CI [-0.43, 0.06]), respectively. This meta-analysis demonstrates that MCT exerts a small to moderate effect on delusions and positive symptoms and a large effect on acceptance of the intervention. The effect on delusions is reduced, but remains significant when potential biases are considered.

SUBMITTER: Eichner C

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4903058 | biostudies-literature | 2016 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Acceptance and Efficacy of Metacognitive Training (MCT) on Positive Symptoms and Delusions in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Meta-analysis Taking Into Account Important Moderators.

Eichner Carolin C Berna Fabrice F

Schizophrenia bulletin 20160108 4

Metacognitive training (MCT) is a new, widely used intervention for psychosis. The present meta-analysis examines the efficacy of MCT in schizophrenia. Fifteen studies comparing effects of MCT on positive symptoms, delusions or acceptance of MCT with a control group were included in this meta-analysis. These studies comprised a total of 408 patients in the MCT condition and 399 in the control condition. The moderating effects of masking of outcome assessment, randomization, incomplete outcome da ...[more]

PMID: 26748396

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Project description:Delusions, a core symptom of psychosis, are false beliefs that are rigidly held with strong conviction despite contradictory evidence. Alterations in inferential processes have long been proposed to underlie delusional pathology, but previous attempts to show this have failed to yield compelling evidence for a specific relationship between inferential abnormalities and delusional severity in schizophrenia. Using a novel, incentivized information-sampling task (a modified version of the beads task), alongside well-characterized decision-making tasks, we sought a mechanistic understanding of delusions in a sample of medicated and unmedicated patients with schizophrenia who exhibited a wide range of delusion severity. In this novel task, participants chose whether to draw beads from one of two hidden jars or to guess the identity of the hidden jar, in order to minimize financial loss from a monetary endowment, and concurrently reported their probability estimates for the hidden jar. We found that patients with higher delusion severity exhibited increased information seeking (i.e. increased draws-to-decision behaviour). This increase was highly specific to delusion severity as compared to the severity of other psychotic symptoms, working-memory capacity, and other clinical and socio-demographic characteristics. Delusion-related increases in information seeking were present in unmedicated patients, indicating that they were unlikely due to antipsychotic medication. In addition, after adjusting for delusion severity, patients as a whole exhibited decreased information seeking relative to healthy individuals, a decrease that correlated with lower socioeconomic status. Computational analyses of reported probability estimates further showed that more delusional patients exhibited abnormal belief updating characterized by stronger reliance on prior beliefs formed early in the inferential process, a feature that correlated with increased information seeking in patients. Other decision-making parameters that could have theoretically explained the delusion effects, such as those related to subjective valuation, were uncorrelated with both delusional severity and information seeking among the patients. In turn, we found some preliminary evidence that subjective valuation (rather than belief updating) may explain group differences in information seeking unrelated to delusions. Together, these results suggest that abnormalities in belief updating, characterized by stronger reliance on prior beliefs formed by incorporating information presented earlier in the inferential process, may be a core computational mechanism of delusional ideation in psychosis. Our results thus provide direct empirical support for an inferential mechanism that naturally captures the characteristic rigidity associated with delusional beliefs.

Project description:BackgroundPrevious studies have revealed the efficacy of metacognitive training for schizophrenia. However, the underlying mechanisms of metacognitive training on brain function alterations, including the default-mode network (DMN), remain unknown. The present study explored treatment effects of metacognitive training on functional connectivity of the brain regions in the DMN.MethodsForty-one patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls were scanned using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. Patients were randomly assigned to drug plus psychotherapy (DPP) and drug therapy (DT) groups. The DPP group received olanzapine and metacognitive training, and the DT group received only olanzapine for 8 weeks. Network homogeneity (NH) was applied to analyze the imaging data, and pattern classification techniques were applied to test whether abnormal NH deficits at baseline might be used to discriminate patients from healthy controls. Abnormal NH in predicting treatment response was also examined in each patient group.ResultsCompared with healthy controls, patients at baseline showed decreased NH in the bilateral ventral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), right posterior cingulate cortex (PCC)/precuneus, and bilateral precuneus and increased NH in the right cerebellum Crus II and bilateral superior MPFC. NH values in the right PCC/precuneus increased in the DPP group after 8 weeks of treatment, whereas no substantial difference in NH value was observed in the DT group. Support vector machine analyses showed that the accuracy, sensitivity, and specificity for distinguishing patients from healthy controls were more than 0.7 in the NH values of the right PCC/precuneus, bilateral ventral MPFC, bilateral superior MPFC, and bilateral precuneus regions. Support vector regression analyses showed that high NH levels at baseline in the bilateral superior MPFC could predict symptomatic improvement of positive and negative syndrome scale (PANSS) after 8 weeks of DPP treatment. No correlations were found between alterations in the NH values and changes in the PANSS scores/cognition parameters in the patients.ConclusionThis study provides evidence that metacognitive training is related to the modulation of DMN homogeneity in schizophrenia.

Dataset Information

Acceptance and Efficacy of Metacognitive Training (MCT) on Positive Symptoms and Delusions in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Meta-analysis Taking Into Account Important Moderators.

Publications

Acceptance and Efficacy of Metacognitive Training (MCT) on Positive Symptoms and Delusions in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Meta-analysis Taking Into Account Important Moderators.

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