Neurotrophic factors in the peripheral blood of male schizophrenia patients

Abstract

The term schizophrenia denotes a psychiatric syndrome of which the delineation is historically attributed to the work ofEmil Kraepelin (Kraepelin, 1971), who lived from 1856 to 1926. Kraepelin described a disorder that starts at a young age and is characterized by clinical and cognitive deterioration that progresses during the course of the disease. For this syndrome he used the terms 'dementia praecox'. The concept was later elaborated upon by Eugen Bleuler (1857-1939) who emphasized core symptoms of the disorder come to be known as Bleuler's 4 A-s': Ambivalence (loss of goal directed behaviour), loosening of Associations, (difficulties in goaldirected thinking), flat Affect, and Autism (predominance of inner thought and concepts over external realities - as a symptom, and not to be confused with the similarly named syndrome). It was Bleuler who gave the disorder its present name, 'schizophrenia', as a general description of the loss of integrated psychological functioning which arises as part of the phenomenology of the disorder. Over the years, many attempts have been made to more stringently and objectively define the diagnostic criteria of schizophrenia. At present, most clinicians and researchers use the criteria as described in the DSM IV. See table 1 for the complete list of criteria.