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| |  Researchers Zooming In On The Brain In Schizophrenia Patients LONDON -- June 13, 1997 -- In two reports in The Lancet this week, investigators focus on brain activity in schizophrenia in an attempt to identify which areas of the brain are involved in the disease, and in what ways. In the first, Dr Nancy Andreasen and colleagues from the United States investigate metabolic activity in schizophrenia patients in the area of the brain known as the prefrontal cortex. To try to avoid the confounding effects encountered in previous studies, the investigators examined cerebral blood flow with a type of scan positron-emission tomography. Seventeen patients with schizophrenia, who had never had drug treatment, were studied in the early stages of their illness. An initial test indicated that patients differed from normal controls in metabolic brain activity, which suggests an imbalance in certain brain circuits. The researchers argue that this may form "the neural basis of schizophrenia through cognitive impairment of the brain ... leading to symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, and loss of volition." Previous studies of schizophrenia have shown abnormalities in blood flow in different parts of the brain. The investigators found both over-perfused and under-perfused areas in the brains of patients with schizophrenia during the acute illness. The seven positive symptoms on the symptom scale showed different correlations with rCBF: formal thought disorders and grandiosity, for example, correlated with high bifrontal and bitemporal rCBF. The authors conclude that some positive symptoms are related to over-perfusion of blood, others to under-perfusion. This finding, conclude the researchers, "may help to explain observed inconsistencies of perfusion patterns in drug-naive schizophrenics".
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