Crow's 'Lateralization Hypothesis' for Schizophrenia

To the Editor.—  Crow and colleagues¹ have presented another ingenious and provocative theory about schizophernia that should lead to a new round of thinking and research about the relationship of cerebral lateralization to this disorder. Their assertion that schizophrenia involves an abnormality of the development of normal cerebral anatomic asymmetries is based, to a considerable degree, on their own findings of parahippocampal gyrus width² and asymmetries of ventricular size¹ in patients with schizophrenia. While we agree that when abnormalities of only one hemisphere have been reported in studies of patients with schizophrenia, the left side is more often implicated, we do not feel that the data are sufficiently robust to conclude that the pathologic process itself is lateralized or that the process "disturbs the mechanisms of lateralization."¹The lateralization theory of Crow et al owes much to an earlier finding of reduced parahippocampal gyral width in