Schizophrenia - BIOLOGICAL EXPLANATION - NEUROANATOMICAL

Abnormalities in the brain were initially studied by carrying out post-mortems and comparing the brains of schizophrenics to normal people.

BUT postmortems have problems with cause and effect. Did the structural differences cause schizophrenia or did schizophrenia or drugs used to treat schizophrenia cause the structural differences.

Now we use scanning techniques.

•  Limbric system: loss of cells in schizophrenics found in both post mortems and scans.

•  Corpus Collosum: Gender differences in the thickness and length of these fibers are reversed for schizophrenics

•  Abnormal early brain development: during pregnancy it is thought a schizophrenics child’s cerebral cortex develops…