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

 Thomas A. Ban’s reply to Per Bech’s comment

Thank you for bringing to attention that “schizophrenia” is defined differently even by the different authors who maintain a “unitary concept of the disease”. In so far as Peralta and his associate findings are concerned, they showed that by dividing the total population embraced by the diagnosis of “schizophrenia” into “unsystematic schizophrenia” and “systematic schizophrenia”, “familiality” was higher in the “systematic” than in the “unsystematic schizophrenia” group. They also found that “familiality” was higher in the subpopulations based on Leonhard’s classification than in the subpopulations based in the other three classifications compared to Leonhard’s classification in the study. These findings indicate that classifying patients on the basis of Leonhard’s classification may offer some advantages in genetic research in mental illness.

Thomas A. Ban

June 16, 2016