Categorizing patients with schizophrenia on the basis of memory deficits may yield neurobiologically meaningful disease subtypes, according to a report in the October issue of Neuropsychology.
“One of the reasons we haven’t been successful in identifying ‘the cause’ of schizophrenia may be because we are studying mixed groups of individuals who don’t really have the same thing wrong with them.
I suspect that studying such heterogeneous samples has been a very large barrier to progress,” lead investigator Bruce I. Turetsky, MD, from the University of Pennsylvania Health System, says in a news release. “Clinical subtypes, such as paranoid, catatonic, etc., ave always been included as part of the DSM diagnosis. What has never been clear is whether these clinical subtypes represent different physiological problems or causes.”
Using the California Verbal Learning Test, brain magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography, Turetsky’s group compared 116 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia with 129 normal controls.
Data analysis revealed three clusters of patients with significantly different profiles on memory testing. The two cognitively impaired subtypes were “cortical” and “subcortical,” with patterns of deficits similar to those found in Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease, respectively.
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