Black sesame-fortified soymilk improves psychotic symptoms in first-episode schizophrenia patients

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disease with neural lesion. Black sesame, medicinal plant enriched with micronutrients has been reported to boost brain functions, but its effects on schizophrenia symptoms have not been elucidated. This prospective one-group pretest-posttest quasi-experimental design was aimed to investigate effects of the black sesame-fortified soymilk (a daily serving size of 180-mL soymilk contained 3.5 g of black sesame seeds and 2 g of black sesame oil) for 3 weeks on psychotic symptoms (brief psychiatric rating scale (BPRS) score) in 63 patients with first-episode schizophrenia. At baseline, 46 had normal (≤ 36) and 17 had high (> 36) BPRS scores. The mean BMI in all subjects was 22.5±0.4 Kg/m2. Twelve participants were underweighted, 30 were normal, and 21 were overweight. BPRS scores measured at baseline (pretest) were normal (n = 46) and high BPRS (n = 17). After 3 weeks of intervention of black sesame-fortified soymilk (posttest), number of the normal-BPRS patients significantly increased from 46 to 60 whereas number of the high-BPRS patients significantly reduced from 17 to 3 persons (McNemar test < 0.001, Cramer’s V = 0.304). These results suggested that the 3-week black sesame-fortified soymilk was feasible to reduce the psychotic symptoms in schizophrenia patients.