Working Memory Impairment as an Endophenotypic Marker in Patients with Schizophrenia: Failures in Encoding or Maintenance?

Abstract

<b><i>Introduction:</i></b> Although working memory (WM) dysfunction has been proposed as a schizophrenia (SZ) endophenotype, the specific impaired component (encoding or maintenance) in patients and unaffected relatives remains inconclusive. We compared auditory-verbal and visuospatial WM in patients with SZ, unaffected siblings (USs), and healthy controls under 2 response conditions: immediate (encoding condition) and delayed (maintenance condition). <b><i>Methods:</i></b> We included 22 participants per group, similar in age and gender. Three WM tests (Spatial Span, Backward Digit Span, and Letter-Number Span) were administered under both conditions in a counterbalanced manner to all participants. <b><i>Results:</i></b> Poorer performance was found in the SZ group for all tests (<i>p</i> < 0.001). USs showed a better performance than patients, but worse than controls (<i>p</i> < 0.05), except for the Backward Digit Span test, in which their performance was similar to that of the SZ group. The effect of the delayed response in all tasks was not significant in any group. <b><i>Conclusion:</i></b> Our results indicate that WM impairment, including auditory-verbal and visuospatial modalities, corresponds to a stable feature of the disease as it is present in USs, thus confirming its potential endophenotypic property in SZ patients. No effect of the delayed response was observed, suggesting failures in encoding in both patients and USs.