Platelet monoamine oxidase activity and schizophrenia —A myth that refuses to die?

✍ Scribed by Alfred Fleissner; Rolf Seifert; Karlheinz Schneider; Wolfgang Eckert; Barbara Fuisting

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag
• Year: 1987
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 734 KB
• Volume: 237
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1433-8491
• DOI: 10.1007/bf00385661

✦ Synopsis

Platelet monoamine oxidase (MAO) activity was determined using kynuramine as a substrate in a group of schizophrenic patients (n = 107), a group of healthy individuals (n = 100), and a group of psychiatric patients who were neither schizophrenics nor alcoholics (n = 110) No significant difference emerged between the schizophrenics and the other two groups, while a significant reduction in platelet MAO activity in a group of alcoholics (n = 60) was confirmed Breaking down the schizophrenic group according to course of illness, phenomenology (paranoid-hallucinatory or not) and drug use did not lead to a significant deviation in platelet MAO activity in any of these subgroups It can also be demonstrated from the literature that the results reached by most research teams question the usefulness of platelet MAO activity as a genetic marker for psychiatric illness.