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Open Access

Correspondence

Author's Response to Dr. Leo

Citation: Sullivan P (2006) Author's Response to Dr. Leo. PLoS Med 3(8): e376. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030376

Published: August 29, 2006

Copyright: © 2006 Patrick Sullivan. 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.

Jonathan Leo raises issues with the adoption literature on schizophrenia [1]. These studies were intensively and independently scrutinized in the 1980s—see the series of papers by Kendler and Gruenberg (e.g., [2]). Most would agree that the number, size, and quality of adoption studies do not provide the highest-quality data (as discussed at more length elsewhere [3].

However, the salient point in my paper [4] was that this body of work (twin, adoption, and family studies) provides a consistent and solid rationale for the search for genes for schizophrenia.

Dr. Leo's comments about the treatment of schizophrenia are not within the scope of my paper.

References

  1. 1. Leo J (2006) Schizophrenia adoption studies. PLoS Med 3: e366. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0030366.
  2. 2. Kendler KS, Gruenberg AM (1984) An independent analysis of the Danish Adoption Study of Schizophrenia. VI. The relationship between psychiatric disorders as defined by DSM-III in the relatives and adoptees. Arch Gen Psychiatry 41: 555–564.
  3. 3. Sullivan PF, Owen MJ, O'Donovan MC, Freedman RR (2005) Genetics. Washington (D. C.): American Psychiatric Publishing.
    • 4. Sullivan PF (2005) The genetics of schizophrenia. PLoS Med 2: e212. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020212.