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.