Changes in the serum levels of autoantibody to nerve growth factor in patients with schizophrenia.

Studies were performed on 54 patients with different types of schizophrenia-paranoid (8), recurrent-progressive (30), and slowly progressive (16), with ICD-10 rubrics F20.00 and F20.01, F20.22 and F20.02, and F21 respectively. An immunoenzyme method was used to demonstrate that schizophrenia patients had elevated levels of autoantibody to nerve growth factor, by a factor of 1.5 compared with a group of 70 healthy subjects. The autoantibody level was related to the stage of disease: during the active phase, there was a significant increase compared with patients in remission (1.38 +/- 0.26 and 0.92 +/- 0.25 U respectively). There were no differences between variants with different disease courses. The authors suggest that the data obtained here indicate that the autoantibody level can be used as a measure of the activity of the disease process.