98 THERAPEUTIC INTERVENTION OF SPORTS PSYCHOLOGICAL EXERCISE THERAPY ON THINKING DISORDERS IN PATIENTS WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA
Authors: Jiang Weiqiang 
Published: February 2025

Background

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, characterized by thinking disorders, such as loose association, logical confusion and closed thinking, these disorders affect the patient’s daily life and social adaptability. Physical psychomotor therapy, as a non-pharmacological intervention, improves the psychological and physiological state of the patients by combining physical activity and psychological regulation. Although studies have confirmed the positive effects of exercise therapy on emotional and physical health, its improvement on thought disorders is unclear. The study aims to investigate the effect of sports psychomotor therapy on thought disorders in patients with schizophrenia and to verify its feasibility and effectiveness.

Methods

The study included 120 schizophrenia patients who met the DSM-5 criteria, and 60 patients were randomly divided into experimental group and control group. The experimental group received 12 weeks of physical psychomotor therapy, including aerobic exercise, group psychological training, and meditative breathing exercises. The control group was maintained on the conventional therapy. Psychological assessment and cognitive tests (Wisconsin card sorting task, verbal fluency test) and functional magnetic resonance imaging (Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, fMRI) were used to assess changes in patient thinking function. For data analysis, independent sample t-test and repeated measures analysis of variance using SPSS 26.0.

Results

The influence of different intervention methods on thinking function (N=120) is shown in Table 1.

As shown in Table 1, the experimental group was significantly better than the control group after 12 weeks of intervention. Wisconsin In the card classification task, the number of correct classification increased and the error persistence rate decreased (P&lt;0.01). The verbal fluency test showed that the word generation increased from 5.6 to 9.2 per minute in the experimental group, with no change in the control group (P&gt;0.05). The fMRI analysis showed that enhanced prefrontal and hippocampus activity in the experimental group was associated with improved cognitive flexibility and memory performance (r=0.68, P&lt;0.01).

Discussion

The results show that sports psychomotor therapy has a significant effect on improving the thinking disorder in patients with schizophrenia. By integrating exercise training and psychological intervention, this therapy improves the cognitive flexibility and concentration of patients, and effectively improves the core symptoms of mental disorders by enhancing the functional activities in the prefrontal lobe and hippocampus. Compared with single drug treatment, this approach focuses more on comprehensive intervention and has higher safety and sustainability. Research provides new theoretical and practical support for non-pharmacological interventions in schizophrenia. However, the long-term stability of the intervention effect still needs to be verified by further follow-up studies.