BACKGROUND Alterations of cortical thickness have been shown in imaging studies of schizophrenia but it is unclear to what extent they are related to disease phenotype (including symptom profile) or other aspects such as genetic liability, disease onset and disease progression. AIMS To test the hypothesis that cortical thinning would vary across different subgroups of patients with chronic sc...

BACKGROUND Abnormal expressions of the N-methyl-D-aspartate receptor and its interacting postsynaptic density (PSD) molecules have been hypothesized to be involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Few studies have carried out association studies with DLG4 gene (coding PSD-95 protein) and sought to validate the results with Asian schizophrenia patients. PATIENTS AND METHODS To further ...

Nitric oxide (NO) plays an important role in the dopaminergic and serotonergic system as the second messenger of the NMDA receptor and has possible roles in neurotransmission, neurosecretion, synaptic plasticity, and tissue injury in many neurological disorders, including schizophrenia. There is also genetic evidence to support the human NOS1 (neuronal nitric oxide synthase 1) gene as a promisi...

BACKGROUND Patients with schizophrenia are deficient in multiple aspects of social cognition, including biological motion perception. In the present study we investigated the ability to read social information from point-light stimuli in schizophrenia. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS Participants with paranoid schizophrenia and healthy controls were presented with a biological motion task depi...

Anders Behring Breivik carried out a massacre in Norway on July 22, 2011, killing a total 77 persons and leaving 42 others severely wounded. He detonated a bomb in Oslo and then drove to the island of Utøya, where he shot and killed youngsters gathered at a youth camp. The authors performed an analysis of Breivik's writing style in his extensive manifesto which he published hours before the att...

OBJECTIVE Schizophrenia impairs performance on explicit, but not implicit, memory tasks, indicating that conscious awareness at retrieval is a critical determinant of impaired memory. The authors investigated implicit learning, i.e., knowledge acquisition in the absence of conscious awareness, in patients with schizophrenia. METHOD An artificial grammar learning task was used to assess implic...

We assessed the vividness of mental imagery in schizophrenia patients in the context of psychopathology and cognitive abilities. A questionnaire on the vividness of mental imagery (Questionnaire Upon Mental Imagery [QMI]) and a hallucination scale were administered to 50 patients with paranoid schizophrenia. The related perceptual and cognitive skills, general intelligence level, and psychomoto...

Therapeutic alliance is one of the predictors of a successful therapy. In the current case study of the 26 year old male student diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia we discuss the possible consequences of a short break in the therapeutic process on the treatment outcome. The client was appointed to an assistant psychologist for study support sessions and to work on his social skills and anxie...