Hippocampus and Schizophrenia

Professor Daniel Weinberger discusses evidence that abnormalities in the hippocampus are associated with schizophrenia.

There’s also a lot of evidence that the hippocampus is disrupted in schizophrenia. So, schizophrenia is not likely, because of the complexity of this condition, is not likely to be the result of a problem of one little compartment in the brain. It’s very likely, because of the complexity of the kind of behavioral difficulties that are seen, that a number of centers in the brain, responsible for different types of processing, are involved. It has been known for quite a while that patients with schizophrenia have trouble with memory. It’s not so much that they don’t necessarily remember things. They do remember things but they don’t seem to be able to access and use memory quite the way people who don’t have this condition do. Memory is very much related to the functional part of the brain called the hippocampus. So based on the observation that clinically patients have memory problems, and the hippocampus is a source of memory processing, there’s been a lot of interest in studying the hippocampus directly in schizophrenia. Studies looking at the tissue of the brains of the people who died with schizophrenia and studies using neuroimaging to look at the size and the function of the hippocampus, as well as some studies of the neurochemistry of the hippocampus, have all converged on evidence that the hippocampus also is an area of abnormality in the brain in schizophrenia.