E: Positron emission tomography studies of abnormal glucose metabolism in schizophrenia. Schizophr Bull

Schizophrenia, a devastating disease characterized by a combination of various types of disturbed behaviors, thoughts, and feelings, may likewise be heterogeneous in etiology. Recent advances hi neuroscience and psy-chopharmacology have suggested a wide array of com-peting mechanisms that may be involved in schizo-phrenia, Including but not limited to deficits in one or more neurotransmitters and second messenger sys-tems (e.g~, dopamine, serotonin, gamma-aminobutyric acid, glutamate, and noradrenalin), neurodevelopmen-tal defects in brain circuitry, and viral infection. Psychiatric genetic studies indicate that schizophrenia is a disorder with multifactorial inheritance. Since cerebral metabolic activity reflects regional brain work for all neurotransmitter systems, imaging metab-olism directly with fluorodeoxyglucose and indirectly with blood flow and hemoglobin oxygen saturation can provide information about the functional neu-roanatomy of a deficit in individual patients and allow patients to be grouped into more homogeneous sub-groups for intensive study. This review summarizes metabolic imaging studies in schizophrenia over the past decade