delegates from 16 European countries; that, delegates from 16 European countries; that, and the previous two meetings, were sup-and the previous two meetings, were supported generously by an educational grant ported generously by an educational grant from AstraZeneca. This report is from a from AstraZeneca. This report is from a meeting of the EFESN held in Whistler meeting of the EFESN held in...

BACKGROUND Enlarged ventricles and reduced hippocampal volume are consistently found in patients with first-episode schizophrenia. Studies investigating brain structure in antipsychotic-naive patients have generally focused on the striatum. In this study, we examined whether ventricular enlargement and hippocampal and caudate volume reductions are morphological traits of antipsychotic-naive fir...

BACKGROUND We compared the attention abilities of a group of first-episode schizophrenia (FES) patients and a group of healthy participants using the Attention Network Test (ANT), a standard procedure that estimates the functional state of three neural networks controlling the efficiency of three different attentional behaviors, i.e., alerting (achieving and maintaining a state of high sensitiv...

OBJECTIVE Previous morphometric studies are suggesting altered cortical thickness mainly in prefronto-temporal regions in first episode schizophrenia. In an extension of these earlier studies, we used an entire cortex vertex-wise approach and an automated clustering for the detection and exact quantification of cortical thickness alterations in first episode schizophrenia. METHODS A group of ...

Animal word list generation (ANWLG) was administered to 47 first-episode schizophrenia (FES) participants and 31 controls. Fifty-nine left temporal lobe epilepsy (LTLE) participants were included as a comparison group with known temporal lobe damage and expected semantic deficits. Semantic knowledge was assessed with the Association Index (AI), a measure of the semantic relatedness of all conse...

Studies with chronic schizophrenia patients have demonstrated that patients fluctuate between rigid and unpredictable responses in decision-making situations, a phenomenon which has been called dysregulation. The aim of this study was to investigate whether schizophrenia patients already display dysregulated behavior at the beginning of their illness. Thirty-two first-episode schizophrenia or s...

BACKGROUND Schizophrenia shortens life, e.g. through suicide and obesity-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes mellitus. It is assumed that medications play a major role, but most of the evidence for this comes from studies poorly controlled for variables such as lifestyle and medication status. AIMS To determine whether schizophrenia is associated (independently of medication) with the de...

Results Most studiesdidnotcontrol for confounding factors such as previous usage ofmedication, lifestyle, age and ethnicity.A fewconducted in drug-na|ve « patientswith first-episode schizophrenia appear to indicate thatthese patientshave higher than expectedrates of visceral obesity and impaired fasting glucose concentrations, whichmayberelated to a subtle disturbance ofthe hypothalamic^ pituit...

First episode schizophrenia (FES) patients tend to be more responsive to treatment. An adequate response has been associated with a favourable long-term course in FES patients. Yet, despite the generally very favourable response profile around one quarter of the patients shows persisting symptoms of psychosis. To improve the outcome and course of psychosis great effort has emerged in identifyin...

BACKGROUND We tested the hypothesis that schizophrenia is primarily a frontostriatal disorder by examining executive function in first-episode patients. Previous studies have shown either equal decrements in many cognitive domains or specific deficits in memory. Such studies have grouped test results or have used few executive measures, thus, possibly losing information. We, therefore, measured...