[Efficacy and application of cognitive rehabilitation: the importance of combining social skills training with cognitive rehabilitation].

Many researchers and practitioners have suggested that improving the cognition of patients with schizophrenia is very important for achieving true "recovery". There is a strong relationship between cognitive function and social functioning; cognitive function affects functional outcomes of schizophrenic patents. Therefore, rehabilitation methods to improve cognitive function have been developed. These methods are generally referred to as "cognitive rehabilitation" or "cognitive remediation". Recently, there has been an increase in clinical research regarding cognitive rehabilitation. We found more than 170 clinical trials of cognitive rehabilitation by searching the literature database PubMed, and the number of trials has increased markedly since 2005. Some meta-analyses of cognitive rehabilitation treatments have already been published (Wykes, 2011; McGurk, 2007; Krabbendam, 2003). These studies reported that the efficacy of cognitive rehabilitations showed a medium effect size for cognitive functions (0.4-0.5). We implemented a multicenter, randomized, controlled trial to examine the efficacy of cognitive training software in patients with schizophrenia. We found that the neurocognitive function and some domains of social functioning showed greater improvement in people who received cognitive training using specialized software than in those receiving standard treatment. The results of our clinical trial indicate that the combination of cognitive and specific rehabilitation to improve social functioning (i.e., social skills training) is valuable to achieve "recovery" in people with schizophrenia.