https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2046-3948
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Wenjing Zhang, Su Lui, Schizophrenia Studies From China: How They Help Extend the Understanding of the Illness, Schizophrenia Bulletin, Volume 51, Issue 2, March 2025, Pages 290–292, https://doi.org/10.1093/schbul/sbaf001
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This theme issue provides an overview of many of the major schizophrenia research initiatives that have developed in China over the past 2 decades. The pace of this effort has accelerated in recent years, increasing public awareness about the disorder and providing the larger scientific community with unique insights. This issue includes 7 reviews of work conducted in China, including studies of individuals at clinical high risk, in first episode, and in treatment-naïve patients with a history of chronic illness, from the perspectives of neuroimaging, analytic approaches, cognition, neurodevelopment, and funding patterns.
Among these studies, neuroimaging is the most commonly used approach to characterize the brain abnormalities in patients during different illness courses in vivo.1 Instead of using standard neuroradiological visual inspection with magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) to identify actionable findings warranting immediate medical attention, the purpose is to use regional quantitative analysis of MRI features to localize distinctive alterations, typically smaller than being readily observed by visual image inspection, that can identify biologically distinct subgroups of a patient and predict and track drug effects with the long-term goal of enhancing treatment planning. This approach has yielded promising findings in many recent studies. These identified brain alterations, sometimes in combination with machine learning algorithms, have also been related to clinical symptoms, cognitive impairments, and treatment responses. Though replication and multi-phenotyping validation is needed before they could be regarded as reliable and clinically useful, neuroimaging, the best clinical method for evaluating the target organ of interest, is a major focus of schizophrenia research in China.
