Hippocampus and Schizophrenia

해마와 정신분열병

Schizophrenics suffer not only psychotic symptoms but also cognitive deficits such as an attentional difficulty, memory impairment, poor abstraction, etc. These cognitive abnormalities have been reported to be significantly related to the social and occupational outcome in schizophrenia. Thus, it is important to explore the cause and pathophysiology for the cognitive abnormalities in patients with schizophrenia. In this regard, hippocampus is one of the most promising brain areas to search for the clue because it is closely involved in memory related function. In fact, during the past several decades, there have been extensive studies supporting hippocampal abnormalities as a cause of schizophrenia in both clinical and preclinical field. In this review, basic anatomical knowledge about hippocampus and major findings of preclinical and clinical studies which investigated the correlation between schizophrenia and hippocampus were highlighted. The contents are 1) anatomical structure of hippocampus, 2) neuronal pathway and receptor distribution in hippocampus, 3) function of hippocampus, 4) hippocampal animal model for schizophrenia, 5) hippocampus-related studies on antipsychotic drugs, and 6) clinical studies in hippocampus in patients with schizophrenia.