[Assessment of frontal functions in psychiatric patients during maintenance electroconvulsive therapy].

Introduction: Previous studies on adverse cognitive effects of electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) have not found any significant alteration of the frontal functions after an acute treatment course. This study aims to assess frontal executive functions in psychiatric patients during maintenance electroconvulsive therapy (M-ECT).
Subjects and Methods: Thirty two patients treated with M-ECT and 29 psychiatric patients never treated with ECT were evaluated with neuropsychological tests that assessed the following frontal functions: work memory, planning, cognitive flexibility, attention, visuomotor velocity, verbal abstract reasoning and phonetic verbal fluency.
Results: Multivariate global analysis did not detect significant frontal function tests differences between both groups. The M-ECT group only scored significantly lower on the FAS test, a test that measures phonetic verbal fluency. A significant correlation between number of previous ECT sessions and performance in the FAS was found.
Conclusions: The M-ECT patient group presented a phonetic verbal fluency alteration that may also be associated to the previous number of ECT sessions. No significant differences in the other frontal functions were detected.