The Early Course of Schizophrenia

New developments in the basic and clinical neurosciences have lead to important advances in our understanding of the events that occur between conception and birth that can influence schizophrenia. At the other end of the life span, some of the most exciting developments in years have recently been coming out of comprehensive studies of post-mortem studies of patients with schizophrenia. In the clinical domain, studies of first episode patients with schizophrenia are proliferating, at the same time as many research groups are performing comprehensive studies of patients with schizophrenia who are in the eighth decade of life or even older. Thus, many of the exciting new developments in research on schizophrenia are at the ends of the life span, suggesting that a wide-ranging treatment of schizophrenia in this framework will be very well accepted.

This volume is unique in adopting a lifespan approach to understanding schizophrenia. There are many aspects of schizophrenia that require research attention from a lifespan perspective. For example, there may be aspects of the behavior or biological functioning that are present before the illness that change an individual's risk for developing the illness. There may be environmental events that can cause schizophrenia in the absence of other predisposing factors. There may be genetic influences on the development of schizophrenia that are modified by environmental events, either psychological or physiological. Factors such as an individual's gender or intelligence may also influence schizophrenia, either in terms of changing the risk for development or changing aspects of the illness' presentation, such as onset age or overall functional outcome.

With contributions from leading scientists in this field, and results from the frontiers of schizophrenia research, this volume is a major new addition to the psychiatry literature.