Studies Of Heredity And Environment In Schizophrenia

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Recently, we conducted a 39-year followup study of the Genain Quaduplets, a unique group of women--identical quadruplets--all of whom developed schizophrenia by their early 20s. The sisters have been the subject of considerable interest over the years from schizophrenia researchers and geneticists. We administered a battery of tests to the sisters, some of which had been given to them in the late 1950s, to plot the trajectory of their performance on attention tests over the last four decades. Although one of the sisters was demented, and confined to a nursing home at the time, the remaining three have not shown significant deterioration, and are performing better than when first seen in the 1950s. The sister who was demented died last year, and efforts to retrieve her brain for anatomical studies were not successful. The hope is that it will be possible to retrieve at least one, and possibly more, of the brains of the remaining sisters in the future. The fact that their cognitive capacities are relatively well preserved, despite 45+ years of a schizophrenic illness, raises questions about the belief that the course of the disorder is inevitably and inexorably downhill. The report was accepted for publication in the Schizophrenia Bulletin and was published in a recent issue (Mirsky et al. A 39-year followup of the Genain Quadruplets, Schizophrenia Bulletin, 26(3):699-708, 2000). An invited chapter for a text on early intervention in schizophrenia was submitted recently and is in press at this time.