Citation: Hambridge D (2006) Profiling of CSF: Small Subgroups. PLoS Med 3(10): e470. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030470
Published: October 31, 2006
Copyright: © 2006 Dave Hambridge. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Funding: The author received no specific funding for this article.
Competing interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist.
This very encouraging article [1] is based on relatively small subgroups of patients. That in itself does not invalidate the conclusions, providing that the subjects in each group have the same illness.
I recently reported that many detained psychiatric inpatients had not been fully investigated to exclude organic causes of their seeming first episode of schizophrenic-like psychosis [2].
These authors state that their patients had DSM-IV–diagnosed schizophrenia, which excludes organic causation. What investigations did they do to ensure that their clinical sample had no organic precipitants?
References
- 1. Holmes E, Tsang TM, Huang JTJ, Leweke FM, Koethe D, et al. (2006) Metabolic profiling of CSF: Evidence that early intervention may impact on disease progression and outcome in schizophrenia. PLoS Med 3: e327. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030327.
- 2. Hambidge D (2005) Secondary schizophrenia. PLoS Med 2: e279. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020279.