Preventing Clinical Deterioration in the Course of Schizophrenia: The Potential for Neuroprotection.

Click to enlarge page

Jeffrey A. Lieberman, M.D., opened with a brief overview of the natural history of schizophrenia. When Emil Kraepelin1 initially distinguished dementia praecox, which later came to be known as schizophrenia, from general insanity, he did so based not on patients’ symptoms or on any particular aspect of the clinical presentation but on the longitudinal course of the illness, particularly the clinical deterioration that was noticed in patients. Patients with schizophrenia in the early part of the twentieth century, when Kraepelin was performing his research, had no treatment available to them and thus were forced to suffer the consequences of their illness.