The genetic and clinical characteristics of 55 patients with schizophrenia and 138 control patients (with major psychiatric disorders), were studied in relation to the season of birth. The morbid risk (MR) of schizophrenia was significantly higher among relatives of the schizophrenic probands born in Spring than among those of the psychiatric controls born in the same season. The MR of schizoph...

We investigated the drawing signs in 200 schizophrenic and 200 normal individuals on Draw A Person test in Pakistan. The sample consisted of men and women between ages of 20 to 50 years in two provinces (Punjab and Khyber Pakhtun-Khwa) of Pakistan. We used Koppitz (1971) method to administer and score the test and selected 40 Emotional Indicators (EIs) from the literature and found 26whichsigni...

Disturbed processing of emotional faces and voices is typically observed in schizophrenia. This deficit leads to impaired social cognition and interactions. In this study, we investigated whether impaired processing of emotions also affects musical stimuli, which are widely present in daily life and known for their emotional impact. Thirty schizophrenic patients and 30 matched healthy controls ...

Anxiety is one of the symptoms in chronic schizophrenic patients. Past research studies show that psychodrama as a group therapy is effective in treatment and rehabilitation of psychological disorders. The aim of this study is to explore the effect of psychodrama on the reduction of anxiety in schizophrenic patients. 26 male hospitalized chronic schizophrenic patients were randomly assigned int...

Schizophrenic patients have been shown to have a moderate excess of winter births in the areas where seasonal variations in weather are large. In this report, we examined the seasonality of schizophrenic births in Taiwan, which has a subtropical climate. Using nationwide hospitalization data (2429 male and 1320 female schizophrenic patients), we applied the life table method to compare the risk...

We attempted to determine whether schizophrenic patients can improve their performance on an abstract reasoning task through experience, and to ascertain how the degree of learning compares with brain-damaged patients and patient controls. Two hundred and two schizophrenic patients, 179 brain-damaged patients and 229 patient controls were compared with regard to their improvement on Subtest 6 r...

Schizophrenia is characterized by affective, cognitive, neuromorphological, and molecular abnormalities that may have a neurodevelopmental origin. MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are small noncoding RNA sequences critical to neurodevelopment and adult neuronal processes by coordinating the activity of multiple genes within biological networks. We examined the expression of 854 miRNAs in prefrontal cortical ...

BACKGROUND Prior research has shown reductions of the N1, N2, and P300 auditory event-related potential (ERP) components in schizophrenic patients. Most studies have shown a greater P300 reduction in left versus right temporal leads in schizophrenic patients. These studies were done with sparse electrode arrays, covering restricted areas of the head, thus providing an incomplete representation ...

The increased prevalence of schizophrenia among patients with the 22q11 interstitial deletion associated with DiGeorge syndrome has suggested the existence of a susceptibility gene for schizophrenia within the DiGeorge syndrome chromosomal region (DGCR) on 22q11. Screening for genomic rearrangements of 23 genes within or at the boundaries of the DGCR in 63 unrelated schizophrenic patients and 6...