Hemispheric asymmetries and schizophrenia

Investigators have hypothesized that schizophrenic patients have abnormal left hemisphere function or deviations from normal function asymmetry. It has also been suggested that schizophrenic patients have reversal of normal structural asymmetries. The authors measured frontal and occipital petalia and frontal and occipital width of each hemisphere on the CT scans of 43 right-handed schizophrenic patients and 40 right-handed control subjects. There were no significant differences in structural asymmetry between the groups. The 8 left- handed schizophrenic patients may have had abnormal functional asymmetries; their mean ventricular-brain ratio, a possible indirect indicator of cerebral atrophy, was higher than that of the right-handed patients.