[Family background of schizophrenic patients displaying acute delusional and hallucinatory psychoses]

The authors studied the characteristics of the hereditary aggravation in probands with schizophrenia first manifested with acute delirious or acute verbal hallucinosis. They also considered the incidence of manifest and latent forms of schizophrenia and the rate of personality anomalies in families of probands with the differentiation of schizoid anomalies by the predominance of sthenic and asthenic features. The frequency of coincidence of the patterns of schizophrenic process among relatives was determined and the data obtained were compared with those in probands from each group. The comparative analysis has shown that the familial background of the studied group of probands reflects the following regularities characteristic of schizophrenia; an increase in the frequency of psychoses of the schizophrenic spectrum as against that in the general population, accumulation of homonomous types of the schizophrenia course and the presence in relatives of abnormalities of the schizophrenic nature. This justifies the referral of the studied forms of psychoses to schizophrenic diseases.