Schizophrenia: a brain disease. II. Functional neuroimaging

Abstract

Functional neuroimaging techniques constitute formidable tools to investigate the human brain in vivo.

This possibility has led to a growing interest in these techniques in psychiatric research, particularly in the study of neural mechanism involved in schizophrenia. Three main lines of research have been developed in this field:

1. Patterns of brain activity in a rest condition or during cognitive task performance,

2. correlations between psychopathology and brain activity, and

3. investigations of neurochemical characteristics (neurotransmitters and neuroreceptors) of schizophrenic patients.

However, despite of the great effort developed lately these studies have yielded little in the way of coherent pathophysiologic theories of schizophrenia. Future studies combining molecular biology and genetic techniques with structural and functional neuroimaging studies are needed in our purpose to explore the neural mechanisms involved in schizophrenia.