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Query: UMLS:C0036341 (schizophrenia)
 60,220 document(s) hit in 31,850,051 MEDLINE articles (0.00 seconds)

Dr. Brown traces the history of America's federal mental health program from its beginning in the early 1900s. NIMH, the institute he currently directs, was established in 1946 for the treatment and prevention of mental and emotional illnesses through research,training, and services. It is now one of the institutes of the Alcohol, Drug Abuse, and Mental Health Administration of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. Dr. Brown describes its continuous progress toward providing high-quality mental health care to the entire population, and discusses priorities for the future that include continuation of research on schizophrenia and depression and research that will benefit children and the elderly.
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PMID:The federal mental health program: past, present, and future. 17 35

This study is a replication and extension of past work carried out by Brown, Birley and Wing (1972) concerning the influence of family life on the course of schizophrenia. In the original research the index of emotion expressed by a key relative about the patient at the time of key admission proved to be the best single predictor of symptomatic relapse in the nine months after discharge from hospital. In the present study this main finding of Brown et al has been replicated for two clinically different groups of psychiatric patients. The expressed emotion of the relative again seems to be associated with relapse independently of all other social and clinical factors investigated. In addition, important additive effects between various social influences and pharmacological treatments have been revealed which make it possible to predict relapse patterns in schizophrenia with considerable precision. The patterns of these relationships with relapse are different for the two clinical groups studied, patients with schizophrenic psychosis and with depressive neurosis.
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PMID:The influence of family and social factors on the course of psychiatric illness. A comparison of schizophrenic and depressed neurotic patients. 96 48

The Wickens (1970) modification of the Brown-Peterson short-term memory task has been used to investigate release from proactive interference (PI) in a number of memory-impaired groups. It has been suggested that failure to release from PI is observed only in patients with compromise of both memory and 'frontal-lobe' functions. The present study examined performance on this paradigm in patients with schizophrenia (SC), a neuropsychiatric disorder which typically includes both frontal and mnemonic impairments. Patients with SC were found to exhibit significantly less release from PI than normal controls. It was determined through correlational analyses that average Trial 1 performance on this task could predict performance on all subsequent trials, indicating that 'release' from PI may measure the same psychological process as the Brown-Peterson task, which does not include a release condition. Trial 1 performance in the SC group was correlated with a wide range of neuropsychological measures, but after the effect of full scale IQ was partialled out, only correlations with measures of memory and measures of frontal-lobe function remained significant. The results support previous formulations of the neuropsychological concomitants of release from PI, but suggest that failure to release on this paradigm may be secondary to a significant compromise of the ability to perform the Brown-Peterson task. It is proposed that the experimental design constraints necessary to elicit a failure to release from PI in any patient group may limit the utility of this measure, and that Brown-Peterson performance may be a more reliable index of the neuropsychological functions involved.
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PMID:Release from proactive interference: determinants of performance and neuropsychological correlates. 147 46

Since the initial observation by Brown (1914) that electrical stimulation applied to the habenular efferent bundle in the chimpanzee evoked a pattern of respiration which closely resembled the act of laughter, the habenular complex has remained a mysterious structure. The anatomy of the habenular complex is well delineated (Jones, 1985) forming a major component of the dorsal diencephalic conduction system. Data derived mainly from animal experimentation over the past decade point to the fact that the habenular complex functions as an important link between the limbic forebrain and the midbrain-extrapyramidal motor system. The elucidation of the functions of the habenular complex may thus significantly increase the current insight into the understanding of the interaction between behavioral and motor functions. Clearly, such information would be of great relevance for further understanding of neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, Parkinson's disease, Tardive dyskinesia, and Tourette's syndrome in which behavioral and motor impairments are interfaced. This review summarizes anatomical, functional, and pharmacological aspects of the habenular complex and discusses its potential contribution to the pathophysiology of selected neuropsychiatric and movement disorders.
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PMID:Relevance of the habenular complex to neuropsychiatry: a review and hypothesis. 182 82

For thirty years research has been consistently demonstrating the validity of the concept of 'High Expressed Emotion' (HEE). After early pioneering work by Brown it was established that environmental influences, particularly, the emotion expressed by relatives to sufferers of schizophrenia, are strongly implicated in relapse. Consequently, the predictive validity of HEE has been revealed in a number of cross-cultural studies around the world. In addition, there is strong evidence from well designed intervention studies, that relapse, in schizophrenic clients living at home, can be prevented by the manipulation of social and environmental factors. The combined body of research that has now accumulated allows an hypothesis to be made about the aetiology of the illness, schizophrenia, itself. This theory has been described as the 'stress vulnerability' model. The paper concludes that psychosocial intervention strategies are effective but that, unfortunately, to date, their application has been mostly restricted to the intervention studies themselves.
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PMID:Expressed emotion and psychosocial intervention: a review. 219 81

Over the last 20 years research has convincingly demonstrated that the illness, schizophrenia, is amenable to social and environmental influence (Leff et al. 1982; Falloon et al. 1985; Hogarty et al. 1986). The impetus for the research is the fact that, at best, genetic inheritance explains only 70% of the disorder's aetiology. The findings of the studies allow certain basic but important principles to be formulated. These are that some people inherit a genetic predisposition or "vulnerability" to schizophrenia which develops either in response to the acute stress of "life events" or the chronic stress encountered in some families. Originally the term "Expressed Emotion" was coined to describe emotional atmosphere at home which was thought to consist particularly of criticism, hostility or emotional over-involvement (Brown et al. 1962). Intervention strategies have arisen from the studies which demonstrates that stress in families caring for a relative with schizophrenia can be reduced, leading to not only a smaller risk of relapse in the relative with the illness, but also an improvement in the carer's own mental health status (Tarrier et al. 1988). Intervention consists of health education for carers and family stress management techniques which may help to lessen over-stimulation in family life. Community Psychiatric Nurses (CPNs) are a rapidly expanding sector of most mental health service provision in the United Kingdom but the evidence is that their role with the sufferer from schizophrenia consists largely of the administration of depot medication and very little else.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)
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PMID:A new role for the community psychiatric nurse in working with families caring for a relative with schizophrenia. 228 14

Studies of live events and schizophrenia are few. Most have such methodological limitations that make any causal interpretation of their findings impossible. Of the three studies with appropriate methodology and controls, Brown and Birley (1968) found very recent life events trigger onset, Leff et al. (1983) found events were capable of precipitating relapse, under certain restricted circumstances, while Jacobs and Myers (1976) found independent events appear to have no significant effect. The widely held view that life events can precipitate schizophrenic episodes may be supported by our own clinical impressions; it is as yet not well supported by empirical data. Future research should perhaps focus on other definitions of these psychoses, such as is now embraced by DSM-III. Perhaps then a relation between stressful events and some of the non-depressive functional psychoses might be demonstrated.
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PMID:Live events and schizophrenic episodes. 386 2

Brown and Birley demonstrated a triggering effect in schizophrenic disorders for life events. In our study no similar result was found. As many events were discovered in controls as in first admission schizophrenic patients for the two 3-month periods assessed: 1-3 months and 4-6 months prior to onset of an acute episode or prior to interview. But methodology used in this study differs with respect to the periods assessed: Brown and Birley used 3-week periods, we used 3-month periods. Patients as well as controls reported significantly more events for the period immediately prior to the onset or interview. We suppose that neither patients nor controls actually experienced fewer events in the second period but that they remembered more of them for the period nearer to the interview.
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PMID:[Marked life events prior to an acute schizophrenic episode. Comparison of a sample of first admissions with a normal sample (author's transl)]. 729 11

Recent studies show that obsessive-compulsive symptoms may occur in many patients with schizophrenia and may predict a poor prognosis. Pilot studies have shown that some schizophrenic patients may improve if a serotonin reuptake blocker is added to their neuroleptic. We have performed a pilot, double-blind, crossover study of clomipramine (CMI) or placebo, added to maintenance psychotropic medication. Six schizophrenic patients with obsessive-compulsive symptoms were studied in a double-blind CMI versus placebo crossover protocol. The patients met DSM-III-R criteria for chronic schizophrenia, experienced obsessive-compulsive symptoms, and had been previously stabilized on their psychiatric medication. The patients were rated at baseline and longitudinally through the study with the Positive and Negative Symptom Scale for Schizophrenia (PANSS) and the Yale Brown Obsessive-Compulsive Scale (YBOCS). An analysis of covariance was used to compare the drug versus placebo effect at the final visit with the baseline rating as a covariate. Ratings on both the YBOCS and the PANSS showed that patients improved significantly more on CMI than on placebo. No patients experienced an exacerbation of psychotic symptoms. Preliminary findings from this double-blind, crossover, pilot study of CMI and placebo, designed to assess the effect of CMI in the treatment of schizophrenic patients with obsessive symptoms, suggest that CMI is superior to placebo in the treatment of obsessions and compulsions and improves overall schizophrenic symptoms. Further studies with larger samples and longer follow-up period are necessary to confirm these preliminary findings.
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PMID:Treatment of obsessive-compulsive symptoms in schizophrenic patients with clomipramine. 763 98

Recent studies of schizophrenia have implicated deficits in processes related to working memory, but the cognitive features of these deficits have been incompletely characterized. We used a modified Brown-Peterson paradigm to compare working memory in patients with schizophrenia and in normal control subjects. Distractor conditions differed in processing demand, increasing in complexity from no distractor to counting backwards (serial threes). We found significant effects of group, of distractor condition, and of a group x distractor condition interaction. The significant interaction was the result of a more rapid decline in the performance of schizophrenic patients with concurrent articulation. In addition, the schizophrenic group also made significantly more intrusion errors. The study suggests that schizophrenic patients exhibit dysfunction of the verbal working memory system due to a diminution in its overall processing resources.
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PMID:Verbal working memory dysfunction in schizophrenia: use of a Brown-Peterson paradigm. 766 40


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