Genetic and state variables of neurocognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia: a twin study. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • To characterize the familiality of cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia, we studied performance on three tasks (visuospatial attention; visuolinguistic conflict, arrow-word; and Wisconsin Card Sorting Test [WCST]) by monozygotic (MZ) and dizygotic (DZ) twin pairs discordant for schizophrenia. The subject sample consisted of six MZ twin pairs, nine DZ twin pairs, and one MZ and one DZ nonschizophrenia cotwin of a patient with schizophrenia. There were two sources of cognitive dysfunction: a nonheritable, state component and a heritable, trait component. Deficits surfaced during the WCST in nonschizophrenia MZ cotwins; this impairment resolved following training in nonschizophrenia MZ cotwins, but not in the probands with schizophrenia, who performed abnormally in all tasks. The results suggest that nonheritable protective factors modulate the specific, plastic, and sometimes subtle neurocognitive deficits related to the schizophrenia genotype.

publication date

  • January 1, 2000

Research

keywords

  • Cognition Disorders
  • Schizophrenia

Identity

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 0033922337

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1093/oxfordjournals.schbul.a033466

PubMed ID

  • 10885644

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 26

issue

  • 2