Tuesday, April 17, 2007
SCHIZOFRENIE
Comment: Over the decades, numerous neuropsychological difficulties have been described in patients with schizophrenia. What we call schizophrenia is a diverse group of syndromes that affect different patients in sundry ways. If all of these researchers had studied the same patients, we might have learned the extent to which this astounding array of deficits occurs concurrently and how specific phenomenologic features correlate with specific biologic findings.
An editorialist who attempts to make sense of this dizzying diversity of findings points out that all of the authors make good cases that their findings are due to uncorrected pathology rather than to medication effects. He hypothesizes that a single underlying pathology might affect different brain regions, as occurs in stroke patients. If so, clinical differences among patients might indicate individual variation in brain areas vulnerable to these underlying processes. Researchers could test this interesting idea by searching for more-fundamental common processes, e.g., whether these various neuroimpairments are associated with specific brain protein abnormalities.
— Joel Yager, MD
Published in Journal Watch Psychiatry April 13, 2007
An editorialist who attempts to make sense of this dizzying diversity of findings points out that all of the authors make good cases that their findings are due to uncorrected pathology rather than to medication effects. He hypothesizes that a single underlying pathology might affect different brain regions, as occurs in stroke patients. If so, clinical differences among patients might indicate individual variation in brain areas vulnerable to these underlying processes. Researchers could test this interesting idea by searching for more-fundamental common processes, e.g., whether these various neuroimpairments are associated with specific brain protein abnormalities.
— Joel Yager, MD
Published in Journal Watch Psychiatry April 13, 2007
# posted by roodbont @ 12:33 AM 
