Schizophrenia Bulletin Advance Access published online on April 9, 2007
Schizophrenia Bulletin, doi:10.1093/schbul/sbm026
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© The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org.
Editors' Introduction: Schizophrenia and Toxoplasmosis
2 The Stanley Medical Research Institute, Chevy Chase, MD
3 Stanley Laboratory of Developmental Neurovirology, Johns Hopkins University Medical Center, Baltimore, MD
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This issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin includes articles on a possible infectious cause of schizophrenia. This approach follows a lead suggested by Emil Kraepelin and Eugen Bleuler a century ago. In the 1896 edition of his textbook, Kraepelin speculated that dementia praecox might be caused by a focal infection of bodily organs that then affected the brain as an autointoxication.1 Fifteen years later, Bleuler, in his Dementia Praecox, or The Group of Schizophrenias, suggested that "the connection of the disease to infectious processes equally needs further study ... many writers assume that schizophrenia is caused by some physical weakness or possibly even by some infectious disease."2
Toxoplasma
1 To whom correspondence should be addressed; tel: 301-571-2078, fax: 301-501-0775, e-mail: torreyf@stanleyresearch.org