33 ANALYSIS OF THE TREATMENT OF COGNITIVE FUNCTION IN SCHIZOPHRENIA PATIENTS THROUGH TRADITIONAL CHINESE CULTURE READING
Authors: Liu Fengtao 
Published: February 2025

Abstract

Background
Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness characterized by sensory, cognitive, and emotional disorders. It often occurs in young and middle-aged individuals and can cause significant stress to the patient, their family, and society. Schizophrenia may also lead to symptoms such as sleep disorders, lack of concentration, and memory loss, which in turn affect the patient’s brain function and cognitive abilities. At present, the treatment of schizophrenia mainly relies on taking antipsychotic drugs, but it requires long-term medication and attention should be paid to avoiding drug dependence and side effects. Therefore, researching new treatment methods for schizophrenia without drug side effects is of great significance. Scholars have found that reading can stimulate the cerebral cortex, improve thinking ability and memory, which has a positive effect on maintaining and improving the brain function of psychiatric patients. Therefore, the study will explore the therapeutic effect of traditional Chinese cultural reading on cognitive function in patients with schizophrenia.

Methods
The study selected 74 patients with schizophrenia admitted to a tertiary hospital in a certain city from April 2021 to May 2023 as the research subjects. Randomly divide these patients into an observation group and a control group, with 37 patients in each group. The control group patients received routine care, while the observation group patients received an additional 3 hours of Chinese traditional culture reading every day on the basis of routine care. The experiment lasts for three months. Use the Scale for Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) to evaluate the severity of patients’ symptoms before and after treatment, with higher scores indicating more severe symptoms. And use the Loewenstein Occupational Therapy Cognitive Assessment (LOTCA) to score the patient’s cognitive function, with higher scores indicating better cognitive function. SPSS 24.0 software was used for statistical analysis of the data, with P&lt;0.05 indicating statistically significant differences.

Results
There was no significant difference in clinical general data between the two groups of patients (P&gt;0.05), so a comparison can be made. Before treatment, there was no significant difference in LOTCA scores between the two groups of patients (P&gt;0.05). After three months of treatment, the LOTCA score of the observation group was 64.24 ± 4.57, significantly higher than that of the control group patients (P&lt;0.05). Before treatment, the SANS score of the control group patients was 67.05 ± 5.97, while the SANS score of the observation group was 67.12 ± 5.34, with no statistically significant difference (P&gt;0.05). After three months of treatment, the SANS score of the observation group was 35.48 ± 2.02, significantly lower than that of the control group patients (P&lt;0.05).

Discussion
With the transformation of modern medical models, the clinical treatment of schizophrenia patients is no longer limited to drug control of symptoms. The experimental results show that reading traditional Chinese culture can activate patients’ thinking, stimulate their thinking during reading, and effectively improve the negative symptoms and cognitive function of patients with schizophrenia. The research results can provide a new option for the treatment of schizophrenia without drug side effects.