CORE--RECRUITMENT, ASSESSMENT AND NEUROPATHOLOGY

The goal of the Recruitment/Assessment/Neuropathology Core is to provide investigators with postmortem tissue from patients who have been consistently and objectively diagnosed as schizophrenic by antemortem assessment and from non-psychiatric control subjects. As such, the Core has two components. The first will identify potential schizophrenic patients over 65 years of age and thoroughly assess and characterize them to arrive at a diagnosis. These patients will be assessed annually until obtained. It will maintain a database of this information and disseminate tissue to investigators while maintaining the diagnostic blind, and when appropriate, break that blind. Such complete phenomenological documentation will certainly demonstrate the heterogeneity in symptoms that characterizes schizophrenia. Although this phenomenological heterogeneity may not be significant for the initial investigations of heritability and cellular and molecular correlates of schizophrenia, such data will prove to be a valuable resource to future investigations. Without careful and thorough prospective assessment, such studies will be impossible.