The disease tends to strike women later, women are less likely to be totally disabled, and their symptoms shade toward more easily-treated delusions and hallucinations.
Women also respond more readily to medication.
Now a new Hopkins study suggests that basic differences between men and women in the way the disease rearranges the brain may be responsible. A report of the work appears in the March American Journal of Psychiatry. The Hopkins scientists found that the overall IPL is smaller in people with schizophrenia. But in men with schizophrenia, that pattern is reversed. This abnormality in a brain region that helps 'map reality' may account for the symptoms of distorted reality we see in schizophrenic patients.