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

Twenty-four male schizophrenics, 12 (SFH) with schizophrenia in the immediate family and 12 (SNFH) with no evidence of schizophrenia in the family background, and 24 male control subjects, 12 highly educated (HEC), and 12 minimally educated (MEC), were assessed for premorbid social adjustment and were administered the Digit Symbol Substitution Test, a size estimation task, and the EEG average evoked response (AER) at different levels of stimulus intensity. As predicted from the stimulus redundancy formulation, the SFH patients were poorer in premorbid adjustment, were less often paranoid, functioned at a lower level of cognitive efficiency (poor digit symbol and greater absolute error on size estimation), were more chronic, and, in some respects, had size estimation indices of minimal scanning. Contrary to prediction, the SFH group had the strongest and most sustained augmenting response on AER, while the SNFH group shifted from an augmenting to a reducing pattern of response. The relationship between an absence of AER reducing and the presence of cognitive impairment in the SFH group was a major focus of discussion.
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PMID:Cognitive and evoked response measures of information processing in schizophrenics with and without a family history of schizophrenia. 70 29

The clinical characteristics of patients seen at the psychiatric emergency facilities in a Canadian city and the determinants of decisions regarding their treatment were investigated. A total of 544 patients who sought psychiatric emergency services from the three hospitals in Saskatoon during a three month period were studied. Cognitive disturbance, past psychiatric history, previous psychiatric hospitalization and diagnoses of substance use disorders, affective disorders, anxiety disorders and schizophrenic disorders were associated with psychiatric emergencies. Psychiatric diagnoses and availability of social support were significantly associated with disposition. The implications of these findings for psychiatric emergency services are discussed.
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PMID:Psychiatric emergency services in a Canadian city: II. Clinical characteristics and patients' disposition. 844 28

A distinct hypokinetic syndrome appears to exist across several different neuropsychiatric diagnoses, involving (1) slowed motor activity with difficulty initiating and sustaining behaviors, (2) anhedonia with depressed mood and reduced affective range, and (3) cognitive impairment. Specifically, three well-recognized states--parkinsonism, retarded depression, and the negative symptoms of schizophrenia--prominently feature the components of this syndrome, and reduced dopamine turnover in the brain has been hypothesized to play a part in the pathophysiology of each. While aspects of this conceptualization remain controversial, it generates testable hypotheses that could have implications for the understanding and treatment of these states.
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PMID:Akinesia: a syndrome common to parkinsonism, retarded depression, and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. 135 15

Somatostatin (somatotropin release-inhibiting factor, SRIF) was originally discovered (1) during the purification of growth hormone-releasing factor from rat hypothalamus and was subsequently isolated and characterized (2) in 1972 from ovine hypothalamus. Since its initial characterization, SRIF has been shown to fulfill criteria for a neurotransmitter and to directly modulate neuronal activity as well as acting as an inhibitory factor regulating endocrine and exocrine secretion. Alterations in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) concentrations of SRIF have been reported in several diseases exhibiting prominent cognitive dysfunction, including Alzheimer's disease (AD), major depression, Huntington's chorea, multiple sclerosis, schizophrenia and Parkinson's disease, while evidence for regional brain tissue concentration deficits in SRIF are more specific for AD. This mini-review will focus on the studies reporting alterations in CSF and postmortem tissue concentrations of SRIF in AD and depression.
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PMID:Somatostatin in Alzheimer's disease and depression. 135 21

The conventional distinction between schizophrenia and manic depression has received little objective support from recent studies of phenomenology, outcome, or familial homotypy. Instead, much clinical, epidemiological, and morphological evidence suggests that within the broad range of Schneiderian schizophrenia there exists one form (congenital schizophrenia) that can be distinguished from other types, the manifestations of which are confined to adult life. We hypothesize that congenital schizophrenia is a consequence of aberrant brain development during fetal and neonatal life. Such patients show structural brain changes and cognitive impairment, and in their male predominance, early onset, and poor outcome, they reflect Kraepelin's original description of dementia praecox. We contend that adult-onset schizophrenia is itself heterogeneous. One important component is a relapsing and remitting disorder that is more frequent in females than in males, exhibits positive but not negative symptoms, and has much in common etiologically with affective psychosis. There also exists a very-late-onset group in which degenerative brain disorder is implicated.
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PMID:A neurodevelopmental approach to the classification of schizophrenia. 137 34

Cognitive impairment varies markedly among schizophrenic individuals, although the reason for this is unknown. A monozygotic twin pair concordant for schizophrenia was evaluated using electrophysiological and neurobehavioral measures. Each twin showed a distinctive pattern of deficits; furthermore, clinical course and electrophysiological activity were not consonant with social and neurobehavioral functioning. Results suggest complex interrelationships between neurocognitive functioning and clinical presentation in schizophrenia.
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PMID:Dissociation of neurocognitive deficits in a monozygotic twin pair concordant for schizophrenia. 142 74

Emotional discrimination was studied in patients with schizophrenia (n = 20) and matched controls. Performance of the emotion-discrimination tasks in the schizophrenic patients was impaired, relative to their performance of an age-discrimination task. Performance patterns in the patient group could also be reliably distinguished from those of normal controls. The impairment was associated with the severity of both emotional and nonemotional symptoms specific to schizophrenia, but not with the severity of nonspecific symptoms. The deficit associated with schizophrenia is more marked than that reported for depression (Gur et al., 1992), particularly for the emotion-discrimination tasks, and showed no difference between "happy" discrimination and "sad" discrimination. The main difficulty in patients with schizophrenia is the assignment of emotional valence to neutral faces. The magnitude of the deficit underscores the salience of emotional impairment in schizophrenia, and its relation to cognitive dysfunction in this disorder merits further scrutiny.
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PMID:Facial emotion discrimination: III. Behavioral findings in schizophrenia. 149 57

Although a number of elderly institutionalized schizophrenic patients appear to suffer from dementia, little is known about the characteristics of the cognitive impairment or its prevalence in this population. In order to answer these questions it is necessary to first reliably and validly assess dementia in elderly schizophrenic patients. This paper reports the results of a study examining the reliability of assessments of the severity of dementia in schizophrenia using scales designed for other dementing conditions and examining the convergence of ratings of the severity of dementia generated from all available sources of information (patient, caregiver, and chart) versus the chart alone. It was found that the interrater reliability of these ratings was very high. On the other hand ratings generated from the hospital chart alone, without contact with either the patient or caregiver, manifested a systematic bias toward overestimation of the severity of dementia. These results suggest that dementia assessment in schizophrenia does not require different instrumentation from that used in other conditions but that relying on the medical chart alone would induce a systematic bias in the results.
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PMID:Assessment of dementia in elderly schizophrenics with structured rating scales. 159 Dec 1

Changes in brain structure have been demonstrated in elderly patients suffering affective disorder. Enlarged ventricles are associated with cognitive impairment and higher mortality. Depressed subjects also may show a greater degree of cortical atrophy and subcortical white matter, and basal ganglia lesions seem to be commoner than in age-matched controls. The abnormalities demonstrated are not as severe as those found in degenerative dementias such as Alzheimer's disease, and at present there is no evidence to suggest they are progressive. There is a convincing association with vascular disease, although further neuropathologic correlates are needed. Functional imaging methods are just beginning to be applied to elderly populations and, in affective disorder, findings are similar to those in younger patient groups. The results from different groups vary due to technologic differences and the clinical heterogeneity of the patients studied. Depression, however, may be accompanied by decreased and mania by increased cerebral blood flow or metabolism. Evidence also appears to be mounting of a state-dependent frontostriatal dysfunction in depression. Challenges for the future include replicating such results using larger diagnostically homogeneous patient groups and differentiating the findings from those in other disorders such as schizophrenia and basal ganglia disorders.
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PMID:Imaging and affective disorder in the elderly. 160 Apr 77

Cerebral ventricular enlargement is present in a substantial subgroup of schizophrenic patients. Most, but not all studies examining neuropsychological performance and ventricular size in schizophrenics show more severe cognitive impairment in those patients with greatest ventricular enlargement. Inconsistencies in this literature have been attributed to different neuroimaging techniques, variation in patient characteristics across studies, and the variety of neuropsychological batteries used. In the present study, schizophrenic patients (n = 49 men, n = 23 women) and normal controls (n = 13 men, n = 18 women) underwent magnetic resonance (MR) imaging of the brain and extensive neuropsychological testing including measures of frontal and temporal lobe function. A complete coronal set of MR images was used to calculate volumetric estimates of lateral and third cerebral ventricles. Highly significant associations were found between cognitive deficits and third-ventricle volume, with measures of frontal functioning, attention, and concentration showing the most robust correlations. In contrast, neuropsychological performance was not highly associated with lateral ventricular size. These findings further support the pathophysiological relevance of ventricular enlargement in schizophrenia. More specifically, third, but not lateral, ventricular enlargement was associated with greater cognitive disturbance in this sample. Results are consistent with pathological involvement of periventricular diencephalic structures resulting in dysfunctional frontal and limbic processing in a subgroup of patients.
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PMID:Third-ventricle enlargement and neuropsychological deficit in schizophrenia. 163 33


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