Study of attention measured by event-related potential as a predictive factor of violence among patients with schizophrenia and substance use disorder

Abstract

Background: The prediction of violence in patients with psychiatric disorders remains a challenging aspect in the field of clinical research. Many studies search the linkage between aggressive behavior and certain genetic conditions, impaired socio-emotional information processing, demographic, and clinical variables. To our knowledge, by far the relationship between aggressive behavior and impaired attention is not clear. Attention is one of the clinical variables that might have a relation to increased aggressive tendency in many psychiatric patients. So the purpose of this study is to measure the attention using ERP and search for its relation to violence in schizophrenic patients and patients with substance use disorder. This cross-sectional study was carried out on a sample of schizophrenic inpatients and patients with SUD (86 male patients) at the psychiatric department of Al-Hussein University Hospital, Cairo, Egypt. Results: The majority of the sample lies in the age group 20–29 years old (38.4%), whereas MOAS showed that the higher tendency to violence was in the dual diagnosis of schizophrenia disorder with SUD followed by patients diagnosed with SUD.P300 wave measurement analysis reflected that the attention is highly affected in SUD patients, while schizophrenics showed delayed thinking. The relationship has a statistical significance (P = 0.001).A statistically significant direct correlation between P300 wave amplitude, latency, and the scale of violence was also found (P = 0.009 and P = 0.022) respectively. Conclusion: Affected attention in both schizophrenic and SUD patients could be considered a potential risk factor of violence.