OBJECTIVE A premorbid IQ deficit supports a developmental dimension to schizophrenia and its cognitive aspects that are crucial to functional outcome. Better characterisation of the association between premorbid IQ and the disorder may provide further insight into its origin and etiology. We aimed to quantify premorbid cognitive function in schizophrenia through systematic review and meta-analy...

BACKGROUND The notion that cerebellar deficits may underlie clinical symptoms in people with schizophrenia is tested by evaluating 2 forms of cerebellar learning in patients with recent-onset schizophrenia. A potential medication effect is evaluated by including patients with or without antipsychotics. METHODS We assessed saccadic eye movement adaptation and eyeblink conditioning in men with ...

Childhood onset schizophrenia is a rare disorder whose prognosis is generally worse than that in the adult onset type of schizophrenia. Conventional neuroleptics have yielded inconsistent results with the risk of exposing the child to extrapyramidal and cognitive adverse effects which could interfere with proper development of the child. Effective and safe use of clozapine in children with schi...

Until recently, most of the research on schizophrenia has focused on young adults. With increasing longevity, the number of older schizophrenia patients in the population is expected to grow. Late-life schizophrenia patients fall into two groups: those who developed schizophrenia for the first time in later adulthood (late-onset schizophrenia) and those who developed the illness earlier in life...

BACKGROUND Substance use may be a risk factor for the onset of schizophrenia. AIMS To examine the association between substance use and age at onset in substance use and age at onset in a UK, inner-city sample of people with recent-onset schizophrenia. METHOD The study sample consisted of 152 people recruited to the West London First-Episode Schizophrenia Study. Self-reported data on drug a...

Carbonyl sulfide (COS) is a promising tracer for partitioning terrestrial photosynthesis and respiration from net carbon fluxes, based on its daytime co-uptake alongside CO2 through leaf stomata. Because ecosystem COS fluxes are the sum of plant and soil fluxes, using COS as a photosynthesis tracer requires accurate knowledge of soil COS fluxes. At an oak woodland in Southern California, we mon...

We compared 20 patients with late-onset schizophrenia, 7 with delusional disorder with hallucinations (paraphrenia), and 13 with delusional disorder without hallucinations (late-onset paranoia). We found that these three categories could be distinguished from each other on some clinical parameters. Late-onset schizophrenia was characterized by bizarre delusions; auditory hallucinations; to a le...

An ongoing study of the phenomenology, genetics, neuropsychology, physiology (eye tracking, autonomic responsivity), neuroimaging, biochemistry, and pharmacology of childhood-onset schizophrenia is described, and pilot data are presented for the first 22 subjects. Differentiation from autism "spectrum" disorders and other poorly defined, severe neurodevelopmental disorders is needed. Eye tracki...

Age at onset is the most important feature of schizophrenia that could indicate its origin. Minor physical anomalies (MPAs) characterize potential marker indices of disturbances in early neurodevelopment. However, the association between MPAs and age at onset of schizophrenia is still unclear. We aimed to compare risk assessment and familial aggregation in patients with early-onset schizophreni...