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Updated: Aug 30, 2026
Investigating Long-term Synaptic Plasticity in Interlamellar Hippocampus CA1 by Electrophysiological Field Recording
Published on: August 11, 2019
Size of hippocampal pyramidal neurons in schizophrenia
J R Highley1, M A Walker, B McDonald
1Department of Clinical Neurology, University of Oxford, UK.
Background:
Meta-analyses of hippocampal size have indicated that this structure is smaller in schizophrenia. This could reflect a reduction in the size of constituent neurons or a reduced number of neurons.
Aims:
To measure the size of hippocampal pyramidal neurons in the brains of people with and without schizophrenia.
Method:
Pyramidal neuron size in hippocampal subfields was estimated stereologically from sections taken at 5 mm intervals throughout the whole length of right and left hippocampi from the brains of 13 people with schizophrenia and 16 controls. Results were assessed using repeated-measures analysis of covariance looking for a main effect of diagnosis and gender, and interactions of these with side.
Results:
We were unable to detect significant differences related to diagnosis, gender or side for any hippocampal subfield for this series of cases.
Conclusions:
For this series of brains, hippocampal cell size is unchanged in schizophrenia.
