A relationship between anatomical and physiological brain pathology in schizophrenia: lateral cerebral ventricular size predicts cortical blood flow.

The authors studied the relationship between lateral cerebral ventricular size and regional cerebral blood flow during mental activation in 30 patients with schizophrenia. Patients with large ventricles had diffusely lower cortical gray matter blood flow than patients with small ventricles. In addition, an inverse correlation between ventricular size and prefrontal blood flow was observed while patients were attempting to solve a neuropsychological test specifically related to the prefrontal cortex. These data suggest that structural brain pathology impairs prefrontal physiology in schizophrenia, implicating a neural mechanism for the intellectual deficits characteristic of this disorder.