He also gave the famous 4 a’s that he presumed lied at the core of the schizophrenia and were fundamental aspects of the disorder.

To recall:

‘affect’: Inappropriate or flattened affect-emotions in-congruent to circumstances/situation.

‘autism’: social withdrawal- preferring to live in a fantasy world rather than interact with social world appropriately.

‘ambivalence’ : holding of conflicting attitudes and emotions towards others and self; lack of motivation and depersonalization.

‘associations’ : loosening of thought associations leading to word salad/ flight of ideas/ thought disorder.

Bleuler maintained that these distinctive and fundamental  features identified and formed the core of Schizophrenia while the manifest symptoms like hallucinations and delusions (first rank symptoms as per Schneider) were peripheral and not that important).

The readers of this blog will also be familiar with the ABCD model of psychology where Affect, Behavior (social aspects), Cognition and Desire (motivation/ dynamics)  are the four fundamental domains; it is easy to see how the four a’s of Bleuler map to the 4 domains of psychology and it seems that schizophrenics have major troubles in each domain:

affect: this directly maps to Affect dimension and inappropriate affect is a major core part of the syndrome.

autism: though named somewhat incorrectly the intent of autism was to catch the behavioral and social impediments of the schizophrenics.

ambivalence: here there are conflicts and ambiguities regarding what one desires; for self and for others; lack of motivation/conflicted motivation  is significant at this dimension.

associations: here the cognitive underpinnings are all too evident- the thought disorganization and flight of ideas is all too cognitive in nature.

It is amazing how the insights of Bleuler from a century before lend themselves so easily to fit the ABCD framework. What do you think, a bit stretched? or have I started making loose associations myself ?

I have written previously about CNV’s and how de novo CNV’s have been recently shown to correlate with disorders like autism and schizophrenia. I have also been militantly proposing that autism and psychosis are diametrically opposed disorders and have been gladdened to find that recent CNV data support that hypothesis.  I reported how 16p11.2 duplications were associated with schizophrenia while micro-deletions at same site associated with autism.  I also reported how a larger study which looked at multiple CNVs found the same reciprocal effects on CNV sites for autism and schizophrenia, thus bolstering the hypothesis that these are diametrically opposed.

By now you might be wondering what all this has to do with ADHD? Well, for one, early this year I started expanding my model and started conceptualizing ADHD as opposed to Autism in childhood and ADHD thus as belonging to psychotic spectrum; I mused that perhaps the same genetic vulnerability that leads to ADHD in childhood could lead to the manifestation of psychosis in teenage/adulthood. Its worthwhile noting that both ADHD and Psychosis are highly correlated with creativity.

So I could not stop my exuberance at finding that CNVs at another site 16p13.11 has been implicated in ADHD and the duplications are present in both ADHD and Schizophrenia. Also, as per the same study , ADHD children carry a large number of de novo CNV’s – a pattern similar ro Autism/schizophrenia. Some, for example the Neuroskeptic, have taken the same loci of CNVs to mean that these CNVs just confer a general risk of maladaptation, but I think they are missing the forest for the trees.  The pattern points to the diametrical model and how CNvs are one mechanism in which tug-of-wars are played (whether evolutionary variation or parent-offspring or between paternal and maternal genomes).

Let me explain what I mean by tug-of-wars. Say you have a evolutionary trade-off between exploration and exploitation, with one extreme being useful in some extreme environmental niche (say food is abundant)  and the other strategy useful in the opposed environmental niche  (say food is scare) . The trait that gets stabilized  should have a bell cure distribution so that the a species can survive even if environment leans toward one extreme.  The way to archive this could be by having distribution of frequency of different alleles; or it can be via CNV mechanism.  You may have some gentic loci for exploration and have a  single popular gene allele that codes for exploration at that loci and CNVs that cause deletions here will lead to more exploitation while CNVs that are duplications will lead to more exploration.  Thus, by CNV mechanism one can have more of good thing or less of a good thing, good depending on context (i.e context says what is ‘good’).

To take the example of  16p13.11 – it seems it is somehow related to mental retardation/ creativity/intelligence. A deletion at this site causes mental retardation/multiple congenital anomalies.=, while duplications have benign effects. I would conjecture that duplications (associated with ADHD and schizophrenia) may actually increase intelligence/ creativity.   That woudl fit with the diametrical model and the finding that ADHD  kids are more creative nd develop language more readily than autistic kids of same age.

I am pasting the background and findings from the abstract below:

Large, rare chromosomal deletions and duplications known as copy number variants (CNVs) have been implicated in neurodevelopmental disorders similar to attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We aimed to establish whether burden of CNVs was increased in ADHD, and to investigate whether identified CNVs were enriched for loci previously identified in autism and schizophrenia.
Data for full analyses were available for 366 children with ADHD and 1047 controls. 57 large, rare CNVs were identified in children with ADHD and 78 in controls, showing a significantly increased rate of CNVs in ADHD (0·156 vs 0·075; p=8·9×10?5). This increased rate of CNVs was particularly high in those with intellectual disability (0·424; p=2·0×10?6), although there was also a significant excess in cases with no such disability (0·125, p=0·0077). An excess of chromosome 16p13.11 duplications was noted in the ADHD group (p=0·0008 after correction for multiple testing), a finding that was replicated in the Icelandic sample (p=0·031). CNVs identified in our ADHD cohort were significantly enriched for loci previously reported in both autism (p=0·0095) and schizophrenia (p=0·010).

To some the fact that ADHD had the same loci as both Autism and Schizophrenia may speak against there being a diametrical relation; however the same was claimed when initially it was found that autism and schizophrenia CNVs were at the same loci; only after looking at the nature of CNV’s (whether duplications or deletions) were the researchers able to identify the diametrical nature of the CNV’s

I haven’t read the full paper yet (waiting for someone to send me the paper) and as and when I get my hands on the full paper, I’ll update this blog post with more details.

Williams, N., Zaharieva, I., Martin, A., Langley, K., Mantripragada, K., Fossdal, R., Stefansson, H., Stefansson, K., Magnusson, P., & Gudmundsson, O. (2010). Rare chromosomal deletions and duplications in attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder: a genome-wide analysis The Lancet DOI: 10.1016/S0140-6736(10)61109-9

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The article is in PLOSOne, an open access journal and is lucidly written , so you should go and read it now. I’ll anyway like to summarize their study results. First a bit of background about creativity psychopathology linkage.

Some research reports positive correlations between various definitions of creativity and a diagnosis of psychopathology [1], [2], [3], [4]. Other studies report that psychopathology is rarely, if ever, associated with creative insight, capacity, or productivity [5]. When artists are studied more carefully, certain personality characteristics appear to reside upon a continuum of both normal behavior and psychopathology. For example, creative expression in the visual arts and poetry has been linked with the overlapping personality traits of schizotypy and Openness to Experience (Openness), and particularly to self-reports of “unusual experiences” and “unconventional nonconformity”, but not the “introvertive anhedonia” characteristic of schizophrenia [6].

This is inline with what we have been covering at mouse trap regarding association of creativity with the psychotic spectrum especially the creativity that is artistic or revolutionary in nature rather than scientific and methodical in nature. This is how the authors distinguish between types of creativity inline with my views that one type of creativity is autistic (cognitive) in nature while the other is psychotic (emotional) and these are on a continuum.

First, there does not exist one “creativity”; rather, this construct is hypothesized to reside upon a continuum between cognitive (i.e., scientific) and emotional (i.e., artistic) behavioral domains [41], [42]. Thus, when comparing scientists and artists directly, researchers have found lower lifetime rates of psychopathology for: 1) scientists compared to artists, 2) natural scientists compared to social scientists, 3) nonfiction writers compared to fiction writers and poets, and 4) formal artists compared to “expressive” artists [3], [4], [43]. These findings have led researchers to hypothesize a hierarchical structure of creativity across disciplines [42], which echoes the notions of “paradigmatic” (i.e., a fundamental model of events) versus “revolutionary” (i.e., rejection of doctrines) approaches as applied to the sciences [44]. The benefits of working within the lines of a given field appear to be lower levels of psychopathology; alternately, individuals with lower levels of psychopathology may be attracted to such endeavors. Similarly, there is increasing evidence that the cost of “revolutionary” approaches to creative endeavors, whether it is in the arts or sciences, may be associated with increased levels of psychopathology although, again, causative links are weak at best.

So that fits in with broader creativity/ psychopathology linkage, but to get back to the current study the authors had already established earlier that performance on Divergent Thinking (DT) (a measure of creativity) “exhibited significant inverse relationships with both cortical thickness in frontal lobe regions and metabolite concentration of N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA) in the anterior cingulate cortex in normal young subjects “. Thus, some theoretical relationship between creativity and underlying brain circuitry in the frontal reagion was available a priori. Also, research by other researchers has already established that ” Both schizophrenic and bipolar patients have been shown to have reduced fractional anisotropy (FA) in the anterior thalamic radiation [12], [13] and uncinate fasciculus [14] within frontal brain regions. Similarly, reduced FA was observed within the uncinate fasciculus of a cohort with schizotypal personality disorder, providing strong support for the hypothesis that similar neural phenotypes may not result in full-blown clinical symptoms [15]. Finally, in normal subjects, the Neuroregulin-1 (NRG1) single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNP’s) SNP8NRG243177 and SNP8NRG221533 were found to predict lower FA in the left anterior thalamic radiation [16]. As NRG1 has been found to predict higher risk of schizophrenia [17], [18] and bipolar disorder [19], and is linked with axonal myelination and migration [20], these authors hypothesize a mechanistic link between NRG1 within the anterior thalamic radiation and risk for psychotic disorders [16].”

Thus, from the above it is easy to see that there should be a inverse relationship between Fractional Anisotropy (a construct related to myelination of axons) in the frontal regions and creativity if one assumes that creativity and psychopathology are related and are on one end of a continuum. And this inverse relationship between creativity and FA is exactly what they found:

Our results suggest a convergence between a cognitive measure of divergent thinking, a personality measure of Openness, and a white matter integrity measure within the inferior frontal lobes. We found that normal young subjects with lower levels of FA within predominantly left inferior frontal white matter (i.e., regions overlapping the uncinate fasciculus and anterior thalamic radiation) scored higher on the CCI; similarly subjects with lower levels of FA within the right frontal white matter (i.e., regions overlapping the uncinate fasciculus and anterior thalamic radiation) scored higher on self-reported measures of Openness. These two regions of white matter overlap with those reported by other researchers who found lower FA in both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder [13], [14], [30].

They could also nail the reduced FA to reduced myelination as radial diffusion was affected more than axial diffusion. As reduced myelination has been shown as a diatheisis for psychosis, this fits in with previous research linking risk factors common to psychosis and creativity.

Whereas more neural resources are often associated with higher intellectual capacity in a parieto-frontal network of brain regions [39], studies in DT appear to suggest that less is often better in a different network of brain regions, particularly fronto-cingulate-subcortical networks linked via white matter loops [40].

One can speculate that frontal region, more concerned with executive control , when with reduced activity or functional connectivity , may not inhibit the other brain regions that much, and may thus lead to flowering of inherent creativity and cross-talk amongst different brain regions. On the other hand too much white matter/ gray matter in this region may lead to too much control and leave little room for flexibility and creativity.

However, while lower FA is commonly seen in diseases where both cognition and white matter integrity are impaired (e.g., Traumatic Brain Injury, Schizophrenia, Alzheimer’s disease) [45], [46], [47], evidence is accumulating that higher FA in particular brain regions may also be associated with clinical disorders including post-traumatic stress disorder [48], obsessive-compulsive disorder [49], panic disorder [50], synaesthesia [51], and Williams syndrome [52].

It is interesting to note that enhanced FA is associated with clinical disorder of Williams syndrome, which is associated with Autism; on the other end of continuum, reduced FA in particular brain region is associated with psychosis proneness, thus providing another convergent linkage of autism and psychosis as opposites.

Jung, R., Grazioplene, R., Caprihan, A., Chavez, R., & Haier, R. (2010). White Matter Integrity, Creativity, and Psychopathology: Disentangling Constructs with Diffusion Tensor Imaging PLoS ONE, 5 (3) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0009818

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There is an article in press in Neuropsyhcologia by Lackner et al that related Dopamine (DA) levels as measured by Eye Blink Rate (EBR) to preschoolers (3-5 yrs old) Representational theory of Mind (RTM).

The authors hypothesized that as one of the neural correlates of RTM is dMPFC, and as dMPFC has dopamine receptors and is innervated by dopmainergic projections along the dopamine mesocortical pathways , hence perhaps it is the dopamine’s tonic and phasic levels that may be correlated with and have a causal role in the preschoolers’ developing RTM abilities.

3-5 years is a critical period in which the RTM abilities are developing in a normal kid and are first found to be deficient in autistic kids. another linkage the authors seem relevant, but which I don’t agree to much, is the error -prediction theory of dopamine. They believe that ToM/RTM abilities develop when one takes into account the behavior of others and finds discrepancies in ones own knowledge and why they act based on certain different assumptions and by realizing this error of prediction modifies ones understanding of others and starts attributing a mind to them. The authors believe that phasic dopamine which has error prediction functions may be affecting RTM via this pathway too; I find that not very convincing.

However, their basic premise that tonic or baseline dopamine affects RTM abilite seems to be on firm ground and they found support for this hypothesis. They did not measure DA levels directly , but instead relied on Eye Bink Rate (EBR) which is a robuts predictor of overall dopamine in the mesolimbic pathways via the caudate nucleus dopamine levels. They also did not measure EBR directly but measured it using EEG waveforms of relevant brain regions above the eyes.

The RTM tasks they used and the Response -conflict executive function (RC-EF) tasks they used are very simple and intuitive and I refer the reader to methods section to pursue them in detail. For our purpose it is sufficient to mention that RTM did not include the famous anne-sally false belief task but had other variants like false belief location task etc.

Their findings were unequivocal. They found that DA levels as gauged from EBR were a significant predictors of RTM abilities and the effect was not mediated by a possible confound- that of RTM and RC-EF linkages and correlations.

For our purposes what is most important is the direction of the effect . More DA levels were associated with better RTM ; while lower DA was associated with lower RTM performance. This is consistent with the DA relation of Schizophrenia/Autism one of which has higher DA levels and better ToM; while the other both poorer ToM and lower baseline DA. To quote:

These findings dovetail with other research connecting dopamine and representational theory of mind in autistic and schizophrenic populations. Both autism and schizophrenia have been associated with RTM impairment (Pickup, 2008; Sabbagh,2004; Savina & Beninger, 2007) and dysregulation of DA (Braver, Barch, & Cohen, 1999; Lam, Aman, & Arnold, 2006). For instance, in the case of schizophrenia there is some evidence that increased levels of frontal dopamine, as a consequence of the pharmacological activity of some atypical antipsychotics, leads to increased performance on RTM tasks (Savina & Beninger, 2007). The present study added to this body of literature by demonstrating associations between RTM and DA in typically developing children. Considered together, this further supports the hypothesis that dopaminergic functioning plays a role in RTM development.

As always, I am excited by more support for Autism and Psychosis as opposites theory and belive this further cements the case and shows possible neurochemichal mechanisms underlying the difference.

Lackner, C., Bowman, L., & Sabbagh, M. (2010). Dopaminergic functioning and preschoolers’ theory of mind Neuropsychologia DOI: 10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2010.02.027

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I have blogged extensively about the Autism and Schizophrenia as opposites on a continuum theory. I remember first putting this theory in words in an article 3 yrs back on the mouse trap titled Autism and Schizophrenia: the two cultures. That 2006 article, in turn, was inspired by Daniel Nettle’s 2005 article in Journal of Research in Personality where Nettle had also proposed the dichotomy and that paper helped crystallize my thoughts on the subject, a theory which I had been building on my own and now supported by someone like Nettle who I respect a lot. Important to note that at that time I was blissfully unaware of Badcock or Crespi and their work. It is to the credit of Badcock that he had published in 2006 his own theory of Autism and Schizophrenia as opposites on a continuum based on parental imprinting of genes and proposed a mechanism. Crespi I guess got involved in Badcocks’s efforts later on and gave it more experimental and theoretic grounding. I firts became aware of Badcock and Crespi’s work in early 2008.

The wider world became aware of the Autism/Schizophrenia dichotomy sometime in late 2008 (November 2008) . at that time too, I was a little disappointed because most of the coverage did not mention Daniel Nettle, who I think should be credited for this work and line of reasoning too. As a consolation, some reports did mention Chris Frith who has also been partly supporting the thesis.

I wanted to give a historical perspective, because I am sure the recent Crespi article would be grabbed on by mainstream media and the pioneers Chris Frith/Nettle perhaps overlooked- but to me they too are heroes for having come up with such profound early insights. this is not to discredit teh work of Badcock and Crespi- they are doing a thorough job of convincing the skeptics and delineating the exact mechanism and genetics involved.

While we are on the topic of historical perspective , let me also pat myself on the back. In May 2008, a study came out that de novo Copy Number Variations’s (CNVs) were quite high in schizophrenics and they are in the same region as that for autistics who also have high CNVs in the same region. While some took that result to imply that Schizophrenia and Autism are same and are not different, I persisted and proposed a mechanism, whereby they could still be opposites : To quote:

Now as it happens previous research has also found that CNVs are also found to a higher extent in autistics. Moreover, research has indicated that the same chromosomal regions have CNVs in both Autism and Schizophrenia. To me this is exciting news. Probably the chromosomal region (neurexin related is one such region) commonly involved in both schizophrenia and autism is related to cognitive style, creativity and social thinking. Qualitatively (deletions as opposed to duplications) and quantitatively (more duplications) different type of CNVs may lead to differential eruption of either Schizophrenia or Autism as the same underlying neural circuit gets affected due to CNVs, though in a different qualitative and quantitative way.

Now one and half year later Crespi et al report the results of their study which has found exactly the same- that is, if deletions in some locus lead to autism, duplications lead to schizophrenia and vice versa. That to me is clinching evidence of my thesis. Who says Science does not happen on blogs- I proposed something to flow as a consequence of theory and exactly the same thing is found as per the hypothesis. I feel vindicated and emotional to some extent. Loves labor has not been lost to deaf ears.

Let us then return to the new and latest study that has sort of proven that Autism and Schizophrenia are opposites, genetically. Crespi et al, report in the latest PNAS edition that comparative genomics leads to that conclusion. What Crespi et al did was look at theCNV s and the locus whee CNV in both Autism and Schizophrenia are involved and sure enough they found the pattern I had proposed. I’ll now quote from the abstract and the article extensively:

We used data from studies of copy-number variants (CNVs), singlegene associations, growth-signaling pathways, and intermediate phenotypes associated with brain growth to evaluate four alternative hypotheses for the genomic and developmental relationships between autism and schizophrenia: (i) autism subsumed in schizophrenia, (ii) independence, (iii) diametric, and (iv) partialoverlap. Data from CNVs provides statistical support for the hypothesis that autism and schizophrenia are associated with reciprocal variants, such that at four loci, deletions predispose to one disorder, whereas duplications predispose to the other. Data from single-gene studies are inconsistent with a hypothesis based on independence, in that autism and schizophrenia share associated genes more often than expected by chance. However, differentiation between the partial overlap and diametric hypotheses using these data is precluded by limited overlap in the specific genetic markers analyzed in both autism and schizophrenia. Evidence from the effects of risk variants on growth-signaling pathways shows that autism-spectrum conditions tend to be associated with upregulation of pathways due to loss of function mutations in negative regulators, whereas schizophrenia is associated with reduced pathway activation. Finally, data from studies of head and brain size phenotypes indicate that autism is commonly associated with developmentally-enhanced brain growth, whereas schizophrenia is characterized, on average, by reduced brain growth.These convergent lines of evidence appear most compatible with the hypothesis that autism and schizophrenia represent diametric conditions with regard to their genomic underpinnings, neurodevelopmental bases, and phenotypic manifestations as reflecting under-development versus dysregulated over-development of the human social brain.

Copy Number Data. Rare copy-number variants (CNVs) at seven loci, 1q21.1, 15q13.3, 16p11.2, 16p13.1, 17p12, 22q11.21, and 22q13.3 (Tables S1 and S2), have been independently ascertained and associated with autism and schizophrenia in a sufficient number of microarray-based comparative genomic hybridization (aCGH) and SNP-based studies to allow statistical analysis of the frequencies of deletions versus duplications in these two conditions (Table 1, Tables S3–S9). For five of the loci (1q21.1, 16p11.2, 16p13.1, 22q11.21, and 22q13.3), specific risk variants have been statistically supported for both autism and schizophrenia using case-control comparisons, which allows direct evaluation of the alternative hypotheses in Fig. 1. One locus (16p13.1) supports a model of overlap, and four loci support the reciprocal model, such that deletions are associated with increased risk of autism and duplications with increased risk of schizophrenia (16p11.2, 22q13.3), or deletions are associated with increased risk of schizophrenia and duplications with increased risk of autism (1q21.1, 22q11.21). For 1q21.1 and 22q11.21, contingency table analyses also indicate highly significant differences in the frequencies of deletions compared with duplications for the two disorders, such that schizophrenia is differentially associated with deletions and autism with duplications. By contrast, for 16p11.2 and 22q13.3 such analyses show that autism is differentially associated with deletions and schizophrenia with duplications.

I cannot cut n paste the table, but a look at the table clears all doubts. They also look at gene association data and come to a similar conclusion ruling out model A (autism, subsumed in schizophrenia) or model B (autism and schizophrenia are independent of each other).

Models 1C (diametric) and 1D (overlapping) both predict broad overlap in risk genes between autism and schizophrenia, and do not necessarily predict an absence or paucity of genes affecting one condition but not the other. In theory, these models can be differentiated by using data on specific risk alleles for specific loci (such as single-nucleotide polymorphisms, haplotypes, or genotypes), which should be partially shared under the overlapping model but different under the diametric model. For the genes DAO, DISC1, GRIK2, GSTM1, and MTHFR, the same allele, genotype, or haplotype was associated with both autism and schizophrenia, and for the genes AHI1, APOE, DRD1, FOXP2, HLA-DRB1, and SHANK3, alternative alleles, genotypes, or haplotypes at the same loci appear to mediate risk of these two conditions (SI Text). For the other genes that have been associated with both conditions, heterogeneity in the genetic markers used, heterogeneity among results from multiple studies of the same genes, and the general lack of functional information preclude interpretation in terms of shared or alternative risk factors.

Models of autism as a subset of schizophrenia (Fig. 1A), and autism and schizophrenia as independent or separate (model 1B), can be rejected with some degree of confidence, but models involving diametric etiology (model 1C) or partial overlap (model 1D) cannot be clearly rejected. Taken together, most of the data and analyses described here appear to support the hypothesis of autism and schizophrenia as diametric conditions, based primarily on the findings that reciprocal variants at 1q21.1, 16p11.2, 22q11.21, and 22q13.3 represent statistically-supported, highly-penetrant risk factors for the two conditions (Table 1), and that for a number of genes, alternative alleles or haplotypes appear to mediate risk of autism versus schizophrenia.
Additional lines of evidence supporting the diametric hypothesis, from previous studies of autism and schizophrenia, include:

• 1. Data showing notable rarity of familial coaggregation of autism with schizophrenia (38), in contrast, for example, to strong patterns of co-occurance within pedigrees of schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, and bipolar disorder (39).
• 2. Psychiatric contrasts of Smith-Magenis syndrome with Potocki-Lupski syndrome (due to the reciprocal duplication at the Smith-Magenis locus), Williams syndrome with cases of Williams-syndrome region duplication, and Klinefelter syndrome with Turner syndrome, each of which tends to involve psychotic-affective spectrum phenotypes in the former syndrome, and autistic spectrum conditions in the latter (5, 40).
• 3. Effects of autism and schizophrenia risk alleles on common growth-signaling pathways, such that autism has been associated with loss of function in genes, such as FMR1, NF1, PTEN, TSC1, and TSC2 that act as negative regulators of the PI3K, Akt, mTOR, or other growth-signaling pathways (41–45), whereas schizophrenia tends to be associated with reduced function or activity of genes that up-regulate the PI3K, Akt, and other growth-related pathways (46–49).
• 4. Increased average head size, childhood brain volume, or cortical thickness in individuals with: (i) idiopathic autism (50–53), (ii) the autism-associated duplications at 1q21.1 (17) and 16p13.1 (32) and the autism-associated deletions at 6p11.2 (31), and (iii) autism due to loss of function (or haploinsufficiency) of FMR1 (54), NF1 (55), PTEN (56) and RNF135 (57). By contrast, reduced average values for brain size and cortical thickness, due to some combination of reduced growth and accelerated gray matter loss, have been demonstrated with notable consistency across studies of schizophrenia (58–62), and such reduced head or brain size has also been associated with the schizophrenia-linked CNVs at 1q21.1 and 22q11.21 (17, 63, 64), and with deletions of 16p13.1 (65).

I am more than pleased with these results. Badcock too is. You can read his comments here. What about you? What would it take to convince you?

Crespi, B., Stead, P., & Elliot, M. (2009). Evolution in Health and Medicine Sackler Colloquium: Comparative genomics of autism and schizophrenia Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0906080106

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