Tim Crow

Professor Tim Crow is a British psychiatrist and researcher. Much of his research is related to the causes of schizophrenia. He is the Honorary Director of the Prince of Wales International Centre for Research into Schizophrenia and Depression. He qualified at the Royal London Hospital in 1964 and obtained a PhD in the University of Aberdeen, Scotland, in 1970. He is a fellow of the Royal Colleges of Physicians and Psychiatrists and the Academy of Medical Sciences. Professor Crow was for twenty years Head of the Division of Psychiatry of the MRC Clinical Research Centre at Northwick Park and then a member of the External Scientific staff of the Medical Research Council in Oxford.

Tim Crow’s long term research interests are in the nature and causation of the major psychoses. These illnesses are characterised by the presence of delusions and hallucinations and disorders of thinking and generally have an onset in early and middle adult life. Encompassing schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis these disorders are common, affecting around 2% of the population in the course of a lifetime.

In the first CT scan study in 1976 Professor Crow and colleagues at Northwick Park demonstrated that there are structural changes (eg a degree of enlargement of the cerebral ventricles) in individuals who have suffered from schizophrenia. Much subsequent work with MRI scans and in post-mortem brain studies has confirmed this and suggests that the changes are in the cerebral cortex and particularly are related to the subtle asymmetries that are characteristic of the human cortex.

What is the origin of these changes? In earlier work Professor Crow considered but was able to rule out a viral causation. There is a genetic component but the nature has been obscure. Professor Crow’s particular recent contribution has been the proposal that the origins of the psychoses relate particularly to those characteristics eg cerebral asymmetry that are associated with the specifically human capacity for language. This leads to a theory of the origin of psychotic symptoms – that they are associated with deviations in the subtle asymmetries of development of the cortex, and that the symptoms arise as confusions between thought and speech and through the abnormal attachment of meaning to perceived speech – and to its genetic basis in the change that led to the evolution of Homo sapiens as a species.

The work of the Prince of Wales Centre will focus on this theory through 1) radiological investigations of brain structure in relation to the symptoms of psychosis, 2) post-mortem studies of the nature of the change at a cellular level, and 3) investigation of a gene (ProtocadherinXY) located on the X and Y chromosomes that has changed in the course of hominid evolution and may have played a particular role in the development of the cerebral cortex, and the evolution of language and the origins of psychosis.