Linked Life Data

10867309

Source:http://linkedlifedata.com/resource/pubmed/id/10867309

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PredicateObject
rdf:type
lifeskim:mentions
pubmed:issue
1
pubmed:dateCreated
2000-9-19
pubmed:abstractText
Enlargement of cerebral ventricles is one of the most replicated biological features, and the one quantitatively most deviant in schizophrenia. It occurs in the early phases of the disease and may have pathogenetic relevance. Whether this abnormality is limited to a specific subgroup of patients or is a common feature to most or all patients affected by schizophrenia, however, is still a matter of debate. The answer to this question would improve our comprehension of the nature of this abnormality and contribute to the debate between the competing hypotheses of biological homogeneity vs heterogeneity of schizophrenia.We performed a distribution analysis of lateral ventricular dimensions of 340 schizophrenic patients and 162 non-psychiatric controls. All subjects underwent cerebral computerized tomographic scan, and ventricular dimensions were expressed as ventricular brain ratio (VBR). After removing the effect of confounding variables (age, sex and type of scanner) on individual VBR, data were power-transformed and different distribution hypotheses were tested by means of the maximum log-likelihood ratio method. Our findings indicate that, in the mixed sample of patients and controls, a mixture of two gaussian curves represents the distribution better than a single gaussian curve, but no evidence emerged leading to rejection of the normality hypothesis in the schizophrenic patients sample. Lateral ventricular enlargement in schizophrenia is not a marker of a discrete subgroup of schizophrenia, but occurs in most, if not all, schizophrenic patients. This supports the hypothesis of biological homogeneity of the disease, at least relative to its major brain morphological abnormality.
pubmed:language
eng
pubmed:journal
pubmed:citationSubset
IM
pubmed:status
MEDLINE
pubmed:month
Jul
pubmed:issn
0920-9964
pubmed:author
pubmed:issnType
Print
pubmed:day
7
pubmed:volume
44
pubmed:owner
NLM
pubmed:authorsComplete
Y
pubmed:pagination
25-34
pubmed:dateRevised
2010-9-2
pubmed:meshHeading
pubmed:year
2000
pubmed:articleTitle
Cerebral ventricular enlargement as a generalized feature of schizophrenia: a distribution analysis on 502 subjects.
pubmed:affiliation
Biological Psychiatry Unit, Institute of Psychiatry, University of Milan, Milan, Italy. a-vita@imiucca.csi.unimi.it
pubmed:publicationType
Journal Article