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Antipsychotic drugs have focused on treatment of positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. While these drugs resulted in improvements of these symptoms, they did not yield the expected recovery to pre-morbid level of functioning. Recently, a growing number of publications have shown that the cognitive deficits are a core feature of schizophrenia and they are critical determinants of poor functional outcome. Measurement And Treatment Research to Improve Cognition in Schizophrenia (MATRICS) is a NIMH initiative that is designed to stimulate development of drugs to improve cognition in schizophrenia. MATRICS has four main goals：1) to promote development of novel compounds to enhance cognition in schizophrenia, 2) to increase acceptance of cognition in schizophrenia as a valid target for drug approval from the US Food and Drug Administration, 3) to help focus the economic research power of industry on this important, but neglected, clinical target, and 4) to identify promising compounds and support proof of concept trials for cognition-enhancers in schizophrenia. In this article, we reviewed the contents of MATRICS and its progress.
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