Thomas: A Ban: In historical perspective. Peralta, Cuesta and their associates’ findings on the highest familiality of Leonhard’s classification in polynosologic study

Ernst Franzek’s response to Thomas A. Ban’s reply

            It is right that our study on the effect of neuroleptics confirm Fish´s earlier findings. We even could state that in one subtype of the unsystematic schizophrenias, affect-laden paraphrenia, the improvement of the psychopathology was striking and highly significant.

            Peralta´s finding of high familiality in the systematic forms of schizophrenia according to Leonhard´s classification, however, remains a mystery. All other modern studies on familial loading based on Leonhard´s classification showed a very high familial loading in the unsystematic schizophrenias and a very low familial loading in the systematic schizophrenic types (Beckmann and Franzek 1992, 1996; Franzek and Beckmann 1992a,1992b, 1998; Stober, Beckmann, Franzek and Schmidtke 1992; Stober, Saar, Ruschendorf et al 2000). May be there is a misunderstanding in the diagnostic procedure?

References:

Beckmann H, Franzek E. Deficit of birth rates in winter and spring months in distinct subgroups of mainly genetically determined schizophrenia. Psychopathology 1992; 25:57-64.

Beckmann H, Franzek E, Stöber G. Genetic heterogeneity in catatonic schizophrenia. A family study. American Journal of Medical Genetics 1996; 67: 289-300.

Franzek E, Beckmann H. Schizophrenia not a desease entity? A study of 57 long-term hospitalized chronic schizophrenic patients. The European Journal of Psychiatry 1992a; 6:97-108.

Franzek E, Beckmann H  Season-of-birth effect reveals the existence of etiologically different subgroups of schizophrenia. Biological Psychiatry1992b;  32:375-378.

Franzek E, Beckmann H. Different genetic background of of schizophrenic spectrum psychoses. A twin study. American Journal of Psychiatry 1998; 155:76-83.

Stöber G, Franzek E, Beckmann H, Schmidtke A. Exposure to prenatal infections, genetics and the risk of systematic and periodic catatonia. Journal of Neural transmission 2002;  109:921-929.

Stöber G, Saar K, Rüschendorf F, Meyer J, Nürnber G, Jatzke S, Franzek E, Reis A, Lesch KP, Wienker TF, Beckmann H (2000) Splitting schizophrenia: periodic catatonia – susceptibility locus on chromosome 15q15. American Journal of Human Genetics 2000; 67:1201/1207

Ernst Franzek

September 8, 2016