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The Continuum of Psychosis and Its Genetic Origins

The Sixty-fifth Maudsley Lecture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2018

T. J. Crow
T. J. Crow*
Affiliation:
Division of Psychiatry, Clinical Research Centre, Watford Road, Harrow, Middlesex HA1 3UJ
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Abstract

Attempts to draw a line of genetic demarcation between schizophrenic and affective illnesses have failed. It must be assumed that these diseases are genetically related. A post-mortem study has demonstrated that enlargement of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle in schizophrenia but not in Alzheimer-type dementia is selective to the left side of the brain. This suggests that the gene for psychosis is the ‘cerebral dominance gene‘, the factor that determines the asymmetrical development of the human brain. That the psychosis gene is located in the pseudoautosomal region of the sex chromosomes is consistent with observations that sibling pairs with schizophrenia are more often than would be expected of the same sex and share alleles of a polymorphic marker at the short-arm telomeres of the X and Y chromosomes above chance expectation. That the cerebral dominance gene also is pseudoautosomal is suggested by the pattern of verbal and performance deficits associated with sex-chromosome aneuploidies. The psychoses may thus represent aberrations of a late evolutionary development underlying the recent and rapid increase in brain weight in the transition from Australopithecus through Homo habilis and Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.

Type
Lecture
Information
The British Journal of Psychiatry , Volume 156 , Issue 6 , June 1990 , pp. 788 - 797
Copyright
Copyright © Royal College of Psychiatrists, 1990 

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