Cognitive-behavioral therapy for schizophrenia: an overview on efficacy, recent trends and neurobiological findings

• Autor(a) principal: Candida,Maristela
• Data de Publicação: 2016
• Outros Autores: Campos,Carlos, Monteiro,Bárbara, Rocha,Nuno Barbosa F., Paes,Flávia, Nardi,António Egídio, Machado,Sérgio
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: MedicalExpress (São Paulo. Online)
• Texto Completo: http://old.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S2358-04292016000500001
• topic: Cognitive-behavioral therapy; Schizophrenia; Psychosis; Neurobiological; Neuroplasticity

OBJECTIVE: Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT) has been recommended by several international guidelines as the gold-standard treatment to address the needs of patients with schizophrenia. This review provides an overview on recent advances regarding CBT for schizophrenia. METHODS: An electronic search was performed on PubMed/MEDLINE, Web of Science and Cochrane Database, using the key-words: "schizophrenia", "psychosis", "cognitive-behavioral therapy", "CBT" and "psychotherapy". RESULTS: Numerous systematic reviews support the immediate and long-term efficacy of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to reduce positive and negative symptoms in patients with schizophrenia. In the last decade, CBT for schizophrenia has been applied to clinical high-risk subjects and delivered using innovative approaches (low intensity, web-based and self-guided). Brain regions and networks which support high-level cognitive functions have been associated with CBT responsiveness. There is preliminary evidence indicating that CBT induces a prefrontal dependent increase in the top-down modulation of social threat activation. CONCLUSION: In the last decade, CBT for schizophrenia has explored new treatment outcomes, targeted acute and pre-clinical populations and provided alternative methods to reach more patients and reduce intervention costs. The patients' neurocognitive profile seems to play a critical role in treatment response and combining CBT with cognitive remediation may allow to enhance therapeutic effects. Although CBT for schizophrenia is widely established as a gold-standard practice, future studies using innovative CBT protocols, exploring brain-related predictors and treatment outcomes may allow this intervention to be more effective, personalized and to reach a wider number of patients.