Six WHO Collaborating Centre took part in the study of the antithymic activity of blood sera of patients suffering from schizophrenia. Blood serum specimens from 118 schizophrenic patients and 62 mentally healthy donors were investigated. Statistically significant differences between schizophrenic patients and the controls were found (p < 0.05). It is probable that as with other biological phenomena described in schizophrenia, antithymic activity is one of the biological factors, in combination with other factors, predisposing towards the development of the schizophrenic process.
Studies were performed on 54 patients with different types of schizophrenia-paranoid (8), recurrent-progressive (30), and slowly progressive (16), with ICD-10 rubrics F20.00 and F20.01, F20.22 and F20.02, and F21 respectively. An immunoenzyme method was used to demonstrate that schizophrenia patients had elevated levels of autoantibody to nerve growth factor, by a factor of 1.5 compared with a group of 70 healthy subjects. The autoantibody level was related to the stage of disease: during the active phase, there was a significant increase compared with patients in remission (1.38 +/- 0.26 and 0.92 +/- 0.25 U respectively). There were no differences between variants with different disease courses. The authors suggest that the data obtained here indicate that the autoantibody level can be used as a measure of the activity of the disease process.
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