The neuropsychology of schizophrenia: A perspective from neurobehavioral genetics

Abstract

Gray et al. have presented an admirable integration of an enormous amount of both clinical and experimental data (deriving from many different fields: neurology, psychiatry, neuroanatomy, neurochemistry, etc.) to arrive at the most complete hypothesis about the neural bases of schizophrenia to date. According to their model, most disruptions of the complex neural pathways involved will lead to schizophrenic symptoms. Both genetic and environmental influences may, separately or together, have multiple effects at many different places in these neural systems. Hence, one of the strengths of the present model is that it provides a way to explain schizophrenia's well-known heterogeneity with regard to symptomatology (e.g., Dworkin et al. 1988; Van Eerdewegh et al. 1987) and presence or absence of certain biological markers in defined subgroups of patients (e.g., Markianos et al. 1990), but also with regard to the genetic correlates underlying this psychiatric disease (e.g., Baron 1986; Faraone and Tsuang 1985; Kennedy et al. 1988).