Fortschritte der Neurologie-Psychiatrie
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While in the midth the 19th century Griesinger and 80 years later Mayer-Gross regarded schizophrenia as a brain disease, a far-reaching change in the view of schizophrenia found expression in the review of Manfred Bleuler in 1951: All classical assumptions of the schizophrenia doctrine and especially, that schizophrenia could be classified a somatically conditioned illness and not psychogenic, would be, as he wrote, shaken severely. On the 1st International Meeting of Neuropathology in Rome (1952) the opinion became generally accepted that pathological changes of the brain could not be expected in schizophrenias. The neuropathological research into psychoses, considered as unfruitful, has been practically stopped. ⋯ According to Dewan for the first time a correlation between psychopathological and brain morphological findings in schizophrenics with the component of pure residual syndrome has been found by our studies, as well as a parallel progression of the cerebral atrophy and the psychopathological changes. Quantitative-morphometric and MRI changes of regions of the limbic system and neurophysiological findings are hints that disorders in limbic key structures are able to explain the basic symptoms and the first rank symptoms, developing out of distinct transition relevant basic symptoms. Finally, the process activity concept and its criteria and its meaning for the studies with functional brain imaging methods are described.