Brain Volume Changes In First Episode Schizophrenia

This article relates the changes in brain volume in the first-episode schizophrenia. It exposes many studies done on patients suffering from schizophrenia to reveal the relationship between changes in patients' brain volume and antipsychotic medication. Recent studies have shown that schizophrenia arise from neurodevelopment abnormalities such as enlargement of the ventricles and decreases in brain volume. Schizophrenia is considered a "progressive clinical deterioration". Actually, recent longitudinal imaging studies have proved that brain abnormalities increase with time. Moreover, MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) and computed tomography have revealed the symptoms that accompany the patients as like the increase in ventricular volume and the decrease in total brain volume. However, these results could vary from one research to another. Furthermore, the article exposes in detail the changes in the global gray matter volume in first-episode schizophrenia by relating the methods and the results of the study done on 34 patients with first-episode schizophrenia. The comparison between the 34 patients and 36 healthy subjects was done along all the experiment. All the subjects' brains were scanned at the beginning and one year later of the experiments. In addition, different types of medications were administered to each patient. One year later, 29 of the 34 patients that suffer from this disorder continued the experiment. Many procedures was taken into consideration in order to get reliable measurements. Different analyses were done in order to compare the effect of different types of antipsychotic medication and the difference between brain volume of patients and healthy individuals. The outcomes have verified that the total brain volume and the gray matter volume have decreased in patients with first-episode schizophrenia, and that the antipsychotic medications affect these changes.

In this article, they began with a general idea about schizophrenia that it is a brain abnormality and that is demonstrated by brain imaging. Then they explained the symptoms of schizophrenia revealed in the MRI studies and the different studies done. Moreover they took a sample of people who suffer from this mental disorder and a sample of healthy people to compare the result at the end. All the peoples were healthy and did not have a history of head injury or alcohol abuse or anything else.

Information was plugged in a table: demographic data for 34 patients with first-episode schizophrenia and 36 healthy controls, then they did some test on all the patients and they constructed another table: clinical data for 34 patients with first episode schizophrenia. At the end they made some statistical analyses. Finally they summarized all the results, that schizophrenia is a mental disorder related to the brain volume changes (decreases) and the enlargement of the ventricles, and the effects of medication on this disorder.

This article discussed an important and a difficult problem,