An international team, made up of researchers from the University of Granada, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of South Florida, has linked the symptoms of schizophrenia with the anatomical characteristics of the brain, by employing magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). Their research, published in the academic journal NeuroImage, could herald a significant step forward in the diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. In a major breakthrough, scientists have successfully linked the symptoms of the illness with the brain’s anatomical features, using sophisticated brain-imaging techniques.
By analyzing the brain’s anatomy, the scientists have demonstrated the existence of distinctive subgroups among patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, who suffer from different symptoms.
In order to carry out the study, the researchers employed a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique called “diffusion tensor imaging” on 36 healthy subjects and 47 schizophrenic subjects.
The tests conducted on the schizophrenic subjects revealed that they had various abnormalities in certain parts of their corpus callosum, a bundle of neural fibers that connects the right and left cerebral hemispheres and is considered essential for effective interhemispheric communication.
Anomalies in the corpus callosum
When the researchers detected anomalies in the brain’s entire corpus callosum, they discovered that certain characteristic features revealed in the brain scans coincided with specific schizophrenic symptoms. For instance, patients with specific features in a particular part of the corpus callosum exhibited strange and disorganized behaviour.
In other subjects, the irregularities observed in a different part of this brain structure were associated with disorganized thought and speech, and negative symptoms such as a lack of emotion. Other anomalies in the brain’s corpus callosum were associated with hallucinations.
“The current study provides further evidence that schizophrenia is a heterogeneous group of disorders, as opposed to a single illness, as was previously thought to be case.”
That’s ■■■■■■■■ because right from the beginning psychiatrists regarded it as not one schizophrenia but rather and I quote “the group of schizophrenias.” Only recently in the DSM-5 has it been considered one disease.
There is also a conceptual difficulty with that statement. The criteria that are appealed to argue that there are several disorders here are rather different than the criteria that motivated the disappearance of the subtypes in the DSM V. The latter was motivated by observed progression of symptoms patients displayed throughout the course of their illness. Not so much by appealing to any hypothesized single cause. As such, the two positions ‘operate at different levels’ and the one cannot be taken to reject the other just like that. The criteria are part of what is meant by the notion of ‘a disorder’ - there is a change of subjectmatter with a change of criteria.
This is true, originally it was classified by symptoms and now here it is classified by cause/brain structure. But what are the diagnostic implications? When can we expect scientific classification of Eugen Bleuler’s “group of schizophrenias?” I’m tired of psychiatry’s bullcrap diagnostic system. I’m tired of our barbaric mental healthcare.
Have been trying to get this across here for months. Although excess dopamine levels seem to be prevalent in sz, they are prevalent in different locales. And over-pruned (thinned out) neural tracks (as well as unduly “thick” ones) vary in location in sz.
Which has been understood since the '50s that I know of. Princeton professor Julian Jaynes was triggered by such research results to look into corpus callousal irregularities in the '60s and '70s, producing the highly intriguing book, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, in 1976. Iain McGilchrist has taken it all a long way further in his remarkable 2009 book, The Master and His Emissary.
The implications with respect to sz being a genetically enhanced, extreme form of reaction to crazy-making, common cultural, social conditioning are described and discussed in exhaustive detail in both of these classics.