Schizophrenia is a chronic brain disorder that affects approximately 24 million people worldwide, with about 50% of those affected by the disorder not receiving care (World Health Organization, 2013). Individuals with schizophrenia often exhibit abnormalities in behavior, cognition, and sociability. While the exact cause of the disorder remains unknown, environmental, genetic, and epigenetic fa...

Patients with childhood onset schizophrenia (COS) display widespread gray matter (GM) structural brain abnormalities. Healthy siblings of COS patients share some of these structural abnormalities, suggesting that GM abnormalities are endophenotypes for schizophrenia. Another possible endophenotype for schizophrenia that has been relatively unexplored is corticostriatal dysfunction. The corticos...

Adolescent-onset schizophrenia provides an exceptional opportunity to explore the neuropathology of schizophrenia free from the potential confounds of prolonged periods of medication and disease interactions with age-related neurodegeneration. Our aim was to investigate structural grey and white matter abnormalities in adolescent-onset schizophrenia. Whole-brain voxel-wise investigation of both...

Diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) studies have provided evidence of widespread white matter (WM) abnormalities in schizophrenia. Although these abnormalities appear clinically significant, the relationship to specific clinical symptoms is limited and heterogeneous. This study examined the association between WM microstructure and the severity of the five main DSM-5 schizophrenia symptom dimensions...

Deficits in explicit spatial memory, as well as abnormalities of the hippocampus and neighboring medial temporal structures, have been documented in schizophrenia and depression. Recent evidence relying on the contextual cueing paradigm has shown that integrity of these structures is crucial not only for explicit memory but also for implicit spatial memory. Using this paradigm, the authors show...

BACKGROUND The quest to understand the neurobiology of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder is ongoing with multiple lines of evidence indicating abnormalities of glia, mitochondria, and glutamate in both disorders. Despite high heritability estimates of 81% for schizophrenia and 75% for bipolar disorder, compelling links between findings from neurobiological studies, and findings from large-scal...

Background. Studies have implicated abnormalities in epigenetic gene regulation in schizophrenia. Presentation. We hypothesize that identifying abnormalities in chromatin structure and the epigenetic machinery in peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMC) from schizophrenia patients could (a) help characterize a subset of schizophrenia patients and (b) lead to targeted pharmacological interventi...

Abnormal language in schizophrenia has been regarded as a hallmark of this disorder. Language abnormalities include loose and unusual associations, tangentiality, and inability to maintain a topic. Recent theories of language dysfunction have invoked working memory abnormalities, as well as abnormal processes within semantic memory in schizophrenia. Two views, often construed as opposing, have ...

Cvetić et al (2009) raise extremely interesting points in chosing to investigate soft neurological signs, which have arguably been forgotten by many psychiatrists. These abnormalities are found in 50-65% of patients with schizophrenia, and yet neurological examinations seem to be so rarely performed clinically (Heinrichs & Buchanan 1988). Perhaps it is time for us to consider again how importan...