Bridging pharmacology and neurodevelopment in schizophrenia

Bridging pharmacology and neurodevelopment in schizophrenia.

At the beginning of the 20th century, when neuropathologists had long searched without success for the neural basis of schizophrenia, this field was called a ‘graveyard for neuropathologists ’. This disappointment opened the door for psychiatrists to focus on psychopathology. The discovery of antipsychotic agents in the 1950s provided a clue to understanding the pathology of this difficult dise...

Bridging pharmacology and pathophysiology via systems modeling.

The lifetime trajectory of schizophrenia and the concept of neurodevelopment

Defining the lifetime trajectory of schizophrenia and the mechanisms that drive it is one of the major challenges of schizophrenia research. Kraepelin assumed that the mechanisms were neurodegenerative ("dementia praecox"), and the early imaging work using computerized tomography seemed to support this model. Prominent ventricular enlargement and increased cerebrospinal fluid on the brain surfa...

Neurodevelopment in Schizophrenia: The Role of the Wnt Pathways

OBJECTIVES To review the role of Wnt pathways in the neurodevelopment of schizophrenia. METHODS SYSTEMATIC PUBMED SEARCH, USING AS KEYWORDS ALL THE TERMS RELATED TO THE WNT PATHWAYS AND CROSSING THEM WITH EACH OF THE FOLLOWING AREAS: normal neurodevelopment and physiology, neurodevelopmental theory of schizophrenia, schizophrenia, and antipsychotic drug action. RESULTS Neurodevelopmental, b...

Rethinking schizophrenia in the context of normal neurodevelopment

The schizophrenia brain is differentiated from the normal brain by subtle changes, with significant overlap in measures between normal and disease states. For the past 25 years, schizophrenia has increasingly been considered a neurodevelopmental disorder. This frame of reference challenges biological researchers to consider how pathological changes identified in adult brain tissue can be accoun...