Abstract
Hormonal levels and their alterations in response to provocative stimuli have been measured in children and adolescents with schizophrenic disorder and autism. Ideally, the neuroendocrine strategy would result in the elucidation of subgroups of patients with specific neurotransmitter abnormalities and provide a sensitive and diagnostic laboratory marker specific to a disorder and predictive of treatment response. The neuroendocrine strategy has been applied to the study of autistic and schizophrenic disorders in child psychiatry only to a limited extent. To date, these studies have corroborated the existence of hypothalamic-pituitary abnormalities in subgroups of patients; however, they have not implicated specific neurotransmitter abnormalities. This chapter reviews several studies performed by the authors and other investigators. They were selected to present the problems and potential applications of the neuroendocrine approach.
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© 1990 Plenum Publishing Corporation
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Weizman, R., Deutsch, L.H., Deutsch, S.I. (1990). Neuroendocrine Abnormalities in Autism and Schizophrenic Disorder of Childhood. In: Deutsch, S.I., Weizman, A., Weizman, R. (eds) Application of Basic Neuroscience to Child Psychiatry. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0525-5_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-0525-5_9
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