Compared to adult onset schizophrenia, childhood onset schizophrenia (COS) is considered to be a more severe form of the disorder and recent evidence suggests that early detection and treatment can lead to improvement in the outcome of COS. The mainstay of treatment of COS is antipsychotic medications. This article reviews the data with respect to usefulness of various typical antipsychotics, c...

BACKGROUND We tested the hypotheses that certain neurocognitive impairments index genetic liability to schizophrenia and that childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a variant of adult-onset schizophrenia (AOS) by determining whether parents of COS probands show the types of neurocognitive impairments found in relatives of AOS probands. METHODS Parents of COS probands (n = 79) were compared wi...

Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a rare, chronic mental illness that is diagnosed in children prior to the age of 13. COS is a controversial diagnosis among clinicians and can be very difficult to diagnose for a number of reasons. Schizophrenia is a psychotic disorder characterized by hallucinations, delusions, flat affect, limited motivation and anhedonia. The psychotic nature of this di...

Impairments in language processing and thought disorder are core symptoms of schizophrenia. Here we used fMRI to investigate functional abnormalities in the neural networks subserving sentence-level language processing in childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS). Fourteen children with COS (mean age: 13.34; IQ: 95) and 14 healthy controls (HC; mean age: 12.37; IQ: 104) underwent fMRI while performin...

IMPORTANCE Abnormalities in structural brain connectivity have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. Mapping these abnormalities longitudinally and understanding their genetic risk via sibship studies will provide crucial insight into progressive developmental changes associated with schizophrenia. OBJECTIVES To identify corticocortical connections exhibiting an altered developmental ...

BACKGROUND AND PURPOSE Childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) is a clinically severe form of schizophrenia, which causes severe impairment to cognitive, linguistic, and social development. There are few prospective and retrospective open clinical trials of risperidone and olanzapine in COS. In this open-label, randomized, prospective study, we compared the tolerability and effectiveness of risperi...

Introduction: Schizophrenia (SZ) and Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) both have life-long negative impacts on the individuals. In contrast to ASD, SZ occurs “rarely” in childhood (before age of 13) which is called Childhood-Onset (COS). Although COS ASD distinct pathologies, they exhibit common characteristics since were described first. One most important commonalities overlapping language comm...

Earlier studies revealed progressive cortical gray matter (GM) loss in childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) across both lateral and medial surfaces of the developing brain. Here, we use tensor-based morphometry to visualize white matter (WM) growth abnormalities in COS throughout the brain. Using high-dimensional elastic image registration, we compared 3D maps of local WM growth rates in COS pat...