In: Psychology
Schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental disorder
that affects youth in puberty and is manifested by a disruption in
cognition and emotion along with negative (ie, avolition, alogia,
apathy, poor or nonexistent social functioning) and positive
(presence of hallucinations, delusions) symptoms.
Cerebral ventricular enlargement is the best-replicated finding,
and this tends to be associated with impairment of
neuropsychological performance. The idea that these abnormalities
have a neurodevelopmental origin gains indirect support from the,
admittedly less consistent, evidence of abnormalities of cerebral
asymmetry and of neuronal migration in adult schizophrenics, as
well as from the better established behavioral, psychomotor, and
cognitive impairments reported in pre-schizophrenic children.
However, the relationship between childhood and adult
neuropsychological and brain structural findings has not been
proven, and we do not know whether only some schizophrenia has a
developmental origin, or whether patients differ only in the degree
of developmental impairment that they show.