Am J Psychiatry 1997; 154:861-863
Copyright © 1997 by American Psychiatric Association
Meta-analysis of postmortem studies of Alzheimer's disease-like neuropathology in schizophrenia [published erratum appears in Am J Psychiatry 1997 Aug;154(8):1180]
RJ Baldessarini, JD Hegarty, ED Bird and FM Benes
Department of Psychiatry and Neurology, Harvard Medical School, Boston, Mass, USA. rib@mrc309.mclean.org
OBJECTIVE: To evaluate the hypothesis that patients with schizophrenia who
have been treated with neuroleptics have a high rate of Alzheimer's
disease-like neuropathology. METHOD: Neuropathological studies indicating
the presence or absence of Alzheimer's disease-like neuropathology in the
postmortem brains of patients with schizophrenia, normal comparison
subjects, and comparison subjects who had affective disorder were evaluated
with Mantel-Haenszel chi-square and odds ratio analyses. RESULTS: Ten
studies with relevant data were reviewed; none of eight with comparisons
indicated that Alzheimer's disease-like neuropathology was more likely to
be found in the brains of patients with schizophrenia than in the brains of
comparison subjects. CONCLUSIONS: Suggestions that cerebral plaques and
neurofibrillary tangles are more common in schizophrenia in association
with neuroleptic treatment were not supported.
