Top Research Papers on Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia, characterised by psychotic symptoms and in many cases social and occupational decline, remains an aetiological and therapeutic challenge. Contrary to popular belief, the disorder is modestly more common in men than in women. Nor is the outcome uniformly poor. A division of symptoms into positive, negative, and disorganisation syndromes is supported by factor analysis. Catatonic symptoms are not specific to schizophrenia and so-called first rank symptoms are no longer considered diagnostically important. Cognitive impairment is now recognised as a further clinical feature of the ...

A range of mechanistically plausible neuroimaging biomarkers for disease risk, diagnosis, target engagement, and treatment response in schizophrenia are discussed, including dopamine hyperactivity, N-methyl-d-aspartate receptor hypofunction, hippocampalhyperactivity, immune dysregulation, dysconnectivity, and cortical gray matter volume loss.

Earlier and broader use of clozapine in patients with TRS is an important measure to improve outcomes of patients with this most severe form of the illness, and studies indicate that response rates are higher when clozAPine is initiated earlier in the treatment course.

The NMDA-R hypofunction model of schizophrenia started with the clinical observation of the precipitation of psychotic symptoms in patients with schizophrenia exposed to PCP or ketamine, and the genetic literature directly supports a non- specific etiological role for glutamatergic dysfunction.

Current advances in evaluating the use of language as a diagnostic or prognostic tool in schizophrenia are reviewed, suggesting an important role for language analyses in the diagnosis and prognosis of schizophrenia.

Specific regions of gray and white matter changes are observed in patients with schizophrenia; gray matter changes being more significant after the onset of psychosis; these pathological changes may be implicated in the impairment of executive functioning, attention, and working memory.

Substantive progress in biological understanding will require parallel advances in functional genomics and proteomics applied to the brain across developmental stages and for these efforts to succeed in identifying disease mechanisms and defining novel strata they will need to be combined with sufficiently granular phenotypic data.

Background: Inflammation plays a major role in the onset and maintenance of schizophrenia. The objective of the present work was to synthetize in a narrative review the recent findings in the field of inflammation in schizophrenia and their application in daily practice.

This large-scale collaborative study suggests advanced structural brain ageing in SZ, and among SZ patients, brain-PAD was not associated with specific clinical characteristics (age of onset, duration of illness, symptom severity, or antipsychotic use and dose).

This randomized clinical trial examines the efficacy and safety of lumateperone for the short-term treatment of adults with schizophrenia.

It is found that the genetic architecture of schizophrenia in Africans generally reflects that of Europeans but that the greater genetic variation in Africa provides more power to detect relationships of genes to phenotypes.

The hypothesis that vitamin D deficiency during early life may increase the risk of schizophrenia remains plausible and warrants ongoing research.

This review and position paper covers the historical and modern concepts of the paradigm of positive and negative symptoms in schizophrenia, as well as a detailed comparison of the assessment tools and psychometric tests used for the evaluation of negative symptoms.

The estimated burden of schizophrenia in the US doubled between 2013 and 2019 and was $343.2 billion in 2019, highlighting the importance of effective strategies and treatment options to improve the management of this difficult-to-treat patient population.

Patients and their siblings show similar microstate abnormalities compared to healthy controls, suggesting that the dynamics of microstate classes C and D are a candidate endophenotype for schizophrenia.

Electroencephalography (EEG) microstate analysis is a method wherein spontaneous EEG activity is segmented at sub-second levels to analyze quasi-stable states. In particular, four archetype microstates and their features are known to reflect changes in brain state in neuropsychiatric diseases. However, previous studies have only reported differences in each microstate feature and have not determined whether microstate features are suitable for schizophrenia classification. Therefore, it is necessary to validate microstate features for schizophrenia classification. Nineteen microstate features,...

The efficacy of antipsychotic drugs for maintenance treatment in schizophrenia was clear and hospitalisation was reduced and underpowered data revealed no evidence of a difference between groups for the outcome 'Death due to suicide'.

The abnormalities in the distribution of sensorimotor-supramodal hierarchical processing topography in the cerebellum and cerebellar-cerebral circuits in schizophrenia are investigated using a novel gradient-based resting-state functional connectivity (FC) analysis.

Unravelling MGB axis signalling in the context of an evolving dimensional framework in schizophrenia may provide a more complete understanding of the neurobiological architecture of this complex condition and offers the possibility of translational interventions.

The current knowledge on the link between blood levels of sex-hormones in women during the various stages of the female reproductive life and the course of schizophrenia is presented and the clinical approach to women with schizophrenia at these different stages is attempted.