Aug 03, 2015 10:57 AM EDT By Staff Reporter, UniversityHerald Reporter

Researchers from the University of Cambridge have developed a "brain training" iPad game that may help patients with schizophrenia live independently, Reuters reported.

 "Wizard" was created to improve the memory of patients with schizophrenia, a long-term mental health condition that causes a range of psychological symptoms, ranging from changes in behavior through to hallucinations and delusions. Although the medication can be used to treat the psychotic symptoms of the brain disorder, patients are still left with debilitating cognitive impairments, including in their memory, and so are frequently unable to return to university or work.

"We need a way of treating the cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia, such as problems with episodic memory, but slow progress is being made towards developing a drug treatment," Barbara Sahakian, who led the study, said in a statement. "So this proof-of-concept study is important because it demonstrates that the memory game can help where drugs have so far failed. Because the game is interesting, even those patients with a general lack of motivation are spurred on to continue the training."

For the study, researchers assigned 22 people who had been given a diagnosis of schizophrenia, to either the cognitive training group or a control group at random. Participants in the training group played the memory game for a total of eight hours over a four-week period; participants in the control group continued their treatment as usual.

At the end of the four weeks, the researchers tested all participants' memory using the Cambridge Neuropsychological Test Automated Battery (CANTAB) PAL, as well as their level of enjoyment and motivation, and their score on the Global Assessment of Functioning (GAF) scale, which doctors use to rate the social, occupational, and psychological functioning of adults.

They found that participants in the brain training group made significantly fewer errors and needed significantly fewer attempts to remember the location of different patterns in the CANTAB PAL test relative to the control group. In addition, patients in the cognitive training group saw an increase in their score on the GAF scale, The Guardian reported.

"These are promising results and suggest that there may be the potential to use game apps to not only improve a patient's episodic memory, but also their functioning in activities of daily living," Professor Peter Jones said in a statement.

The findings are detailed in the journal Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B.

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