Schizophrenia is thought to be caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors; however, its pathogenesis remains largely unknown. Here, we focus on the endothelial tight-junction protein claudin-5 (CLDN5), because the CLDN5 gene is mapped to the schizophrenia-associated 22q11.2 deletion region, and a single nucleotide polymorphism in the CLDN5 locus is also linked to schizophrenia...

BACKGROUND The alpha7 neuronal nicotinic acetylcholine receptor subunit gene (CHRNA7) has been implicated as a candidate gene for schizophrenia, and for an auditory sensory processing deficit found in the disease, by both genetic linkage at 15q14 and biochemical data. The expression of CHRNA7 is reduced in several brain regions in schizophrenic subjects compared with control subjects. This stud...

OBJECTIVES This study is the first to use magnetisation transfer imaging (MTI), a technique sensitive to myelin and axonal abnormalities, to investigate the white matter in vivo in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS MTI was performed in 25 schizophrenic patients and 30 healthy controls. A region of interest (ROI) approach was used to obtain magnetisation transfer ratios (MTRs) in several re...

BACKGROUND The prevalence of negative symptoms in schizophrenic patients seems to be an important indicator for treatment response and prognosis. Although negative symptoms have often been attributed to frontal lobe anomalies, neuropsychological and anatomical findings do not explicitly support this assumption. Since knowledge about the cerebral correlate of negative symptoms in schizophrenia m...

objective: finding a suitable laboratory test that can diagnose schizophrenia in its early stages could be very important. according to the hypothesis of lack of noradrenalin balance in the brain, it is illustrated that the disorder severity has a negative correlation with the amount of urine noradrenalin metabolite [3-methoxy-4-hydroxy phenyl glycol (mhpg) sulfate]. in this research, instead o...

INTRODUCTION Substance abuse among schizophrenic patients is a growing clinical concern. Substance use disorders and their effects on the course of schizophrenia have made the identification and treatment of schizophrenic patients a high priority. This study aimed to investigate the prevalence of substance use, preferred types of substances, sociodemographic characteristics and clinical feature...

It is generally assumed that anticholinergic drugs have no effects on schizophrenic symptomatology. A few studies, however, indicate that anticholinergic agents aggravate psychotic symptoms and antagonize therapeutic effects of neuroleptics in schizophrenic patients; more recently, some investigators have observed that these agents appear to benefit negative symptoms. In an effort to resolve th...

A SIGNIFICANT elevation in plasma magnesium concentration in a small series of schizophrenic and depressive patients has recently been reported by Cade (1). These levels were said to be further elevated by treatment. The present study, as part of a study of blood from schizophrenic patients (2, 3), was undertaken to determine if these observations represented a general phenomenon among schizoph...

There are many reports of clinical and biological gender differences in schizophrenia. Gender differences in structural brain abnormalities in schizophrenia have been reported on both computed tomographic (CT) and magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans. We present here a new MRI study of cerebral structures in schizophrenia. On the basis of previous findings, we hypothesized that schizophrenic ...