Systems Pathology in Schizophrenia: The Limbic Cortex

Systems Pathology in Schizophrenia: The Limbic Cortex

In looking for sites of pathophysiology in the cerebral cortex, several lines of evidence point to abnormal limbic function. Decades of postmortem research in schizophrenia have reported structural, histologic, and neurochemical changes in limbic cor-tex (Jakob and Beckmann, 1989). Abnormalities in hippocam-pal size (Bogerts et al., 1985), axial orientation (Scheibel and Kovelman, 1981), neuronal and nonneuronal number (Benes et al., 1991, 1998; Heckers et al., 1991; Jeste and Lohr, 1989), and changes in neurochemical markers of transmission and de-velopment (Akbarian et al., 1993; Gao et al., 2000; Tsai et al., 1995) have all been reported in postmortem schizophrenia tissue, although not always reliably replicated (Altshuler et al., 1987; Jakob and Beckmann, 1989). Curiously, often more pronounced or significant changes are reported in the left compared with the right hemisphere (Zaidel et al., 1997).