The investigation which this report will deal with was initially motivated by the hypothesis that in schizophrenia there is a heightened tendency to produce antibodies against certain of the endocrine and other tissue constituents of one's own body. In particular, glands such as the pituitary, adrenals, and thyroid which are involved in adaptive responses to stress were thought to be likely targets for the autoantibodies of schizophrenic patients. So far our investigation has centered on thyroglobulin, the major protein constituent of the thyroid gland; first because of the large number of reports in the literature of abnormal functioning of the thyroid gland in schizophrenic patients in the absence of overt thyroid disease,1-5 and second because very good serological procedures have been developed for detecting autoantibodies to human thyroglobulin.6,7
The most sensitive of these procedures, the tanned cell hemagglutination test, has now been used in