THE CONTINUUM OF PSYCHOSIS AND ITS GENETIC ORIGINS - THE 65TH MAUDSLEY LECTURE

Attempts to draw a line of genetic demarcation between schizophrenic and affective illnesses have failed. It must be assumed that these diseases are genetically related. A postmortem study has demonstrated that enlargement of the temporal horn of the lateral ventricle in schizophrenia but not in Alzheimer-type dementia is selective to the left side of the brain. This sugests that the gene for psychosis is the 'cerebral dominance gene', the factor that determines the asymmetrical development of the human brain. That the psychosis gene is located in the pseudoautosomal region of the sex chromosomes is consistent with observations that sibling pairs with schizophrenia are more often than would be expected of the same sex and share alleles of a polymorphic marker at the short-arm telomeres of the X and Y chromosomes above chance expectation. That the cerebral dominance gene also is pseudoautosomal is suggested by the pattern of verbal and performance deficits associated with sex-chromosome aneuploidies. The psychoses may thus represent aberrations of a late evolutionary development underlying the recent and rapid increase in brain weight in the transition from Australopithecus through Homo habilis and Homo erectus to Homo sapiens.