Is schizophrenia an autoimmune disease? A review.

Autoimmunity has been shown to be the basis of an ever-increasing number of human diseases. Schizophrenia shares a number of genetic features with these autoimmune diseases and therefore could be an autoimmune disease itself. Several lines of evidence suggest that overactivity of dopaminergic pathways in some areas of the brain are involved in schizophrenia, but the apparent absence of an increase in dopamine turnover suggests that this hyperactivity could be mediated by a dopamine agonist rather than by dopamine itself. Schizophrenia is reviewed in the light of precedents from the field of autoimmune diseases in which autoantibodies have been shown to be able to interact with, and sometimes stimulate hormone receptors, thereby causing disease.