Studies suggest that schizophrenia may be heritable and nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of schizophrenia have been suggested to demonstrate similar neurocognitive impairment experienced by the patients. However, most of the studies have been limited to the study of retrospective memory, i.e., the ability for remembering the past events. Very few studies have been conducted to examine the ability to remember things for the future, i.e., prospective memory. This ability is very important for everyday life functioning such as remembering for shutting down the stove after cooking or remembering for turning up in an important appointment. 

The team led by Dr. Raymond Chan has conducted a study to examine such a prospective memory ability in a group of nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of schizophrenia. In this study, Drs. Ya Wang and Raymond Chan administered a set of tasks specifically examining prospective memory in 26 non-psychotic first-degree relatives of schizophrenic patients and 26 healthy volunteers. They showed that the relatives performed significantly worse than the comparisons on most indices of the PM tasks, with a similar pattern of impairment found in other neurocognitive measures. To our best knowledge, this is the first study of PM performance in non-psychotic first-degree relatives of schizophrenia. Together with findings from previous studies, results of the current study suggest that PM may be a potential endophenotype for schizophrenia.

This study was supported partially by the Research Initiation Fund (113000C151), and Young Investigator Scientific Fund (O9CX073007) of Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, and the Research Initiation Fund (O7CX031003) and the Knowledge Innovation Project of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-R-131), and the National Basic Research Programme (973 Programme No. 2007CB512302).

This study is available online:

Wang, Y., Chan, R. C. K*, Cui, J., Deng, Y., Huang, J., Li, H., Yan, C., Xu, T., Ma, Z., Hong , X., Li, Z., Shi, H., Shum, D. (2010). Prospective memory in non-psychotic first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia. Psychiatry Research, doi: 10.1016/j.psychres.2009.07.011