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Describe schizophrenia

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Describe schizophrenia
Explain the neurological damage/changes to the brain as a result of your selected illness.

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Solution Summary

Explain the neurological damage/changes to the brain as a result of your selected illness.

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First go to: http://www.schizophrenia.com/disease.htm
"A brief summary of some of the evidence that proves this point follows.

Significant Loss of Brain Gray Matter: Individuals with schizophrenia, including those who have never been treated, have a reduced volume of gray matter in the brain, especially in the temporal and frontal lobes. Recently neuroscientists have detected gray matter loss of up to 25% (in some areas). The damage started in the parietal, or outer, regions of the brain but spread to the rest of the brain over a five year period. Patients with the worst brain tissue loss also had the worst symptoms, which included hallucinations, delusions, bizarre and psychotic thoughts, hearing voices, and depression. "

#1. Describe schizophrenia

Brain Abnormalities in Schizophrenia
A Neurological Disorder

Explanations, causes and treatments of Schizophrenia contain many views from experimental psychopathology and cognitive neurobiological behavior. Learning from the Gestalt theory is an interesting perspective. Schizophrenia is a major mental illness characterized by positive and negative symptoms of continuous abnormal perceptions (psychosis) of reality. These perceptions could come from brain trauma or developmental damage. Found by Psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin in 1887 and Psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler in 1911, this mental disorder affects one out of every 100 people in the United States.

To determine what causes schizophrenia within the brain starts back many years ago. In order to understand how schizophrenia became it's important to also know how the mental disorder was researched. In 1976, a scan called computed tomography (CT) was one of the first inside views to study schizophrenia in the brain. It found abnormally large lateral ventricles but could not differentiate between other gray and white matter views on the scan but only size. Large ventricles (four fluid-filled cavities within the brain) and decreased brain size was a sign of schizophrenia. In 1984, a new type of imaging called magnetic resonance (MR) could evaluate a little more of the gray and white matters but only based on magnets with a field strength of less than 1% and brain slices at thickness 1cm. By August 1992, the The New England Journal of Medicine with the assistance from the Surgical Planning Laboratory found that ...

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