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F Owen, T J Crow, Neurotransmitters and psychosis, British Medical Bulletin, Volume 43, Issue 3, 1987, Pages 651–671, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.bmb.a072207
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Abstract
That the underlying disturbance in psychotic illness is one of neurohumoural transmission is suggested by the facts that the symptoms of the disease are ameliorated by agents with actions on specific transmitter (particularly monoamine) mechanisms and that psychiatric disturbance resembling affective illness and schizophrenia can be induced by agents with actions on the same transmitters. However direct evidence for the postulated transmitter disturbances remains tantalisingly elusive, particularly in the affective disorders where post-mortem studies which might have been expected to reveal the predicted disturbance of monoaminergic transmission have yielded negative findings. In schizophrenia an increase in D 2 dopamine receptors (detected both in post-mortem and in recent in vivo imaging studies) remains as a possible correlate of the disease process.
