Scientists may be inching their way closer to understanding the biological cause of schizophrenia, as well as explaining the reason it often manifests during adolescence or childhood.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that affects more than 2 million people in the United States. Existing drugs designed to treat it only dull its symptoms, but do not tap into its roots, experts said.
According to the Schizophrenia and Related Disorders Alliance of America (SARDAA), a group that aims to shatter stigma about mental disorders, only half of people diagnosed with schizophrenia receive treatment.
Schizophrenia is not as common as other mental disorders, but it is extremely debilitating. It greatly affects how a person feels, thinks and behaves.
Often, people with schizophrenia may sit for hours without moving or speaking, and may seem fine until they talk about what they are really thinking.
For the patient and the people surrounding him or her, having to live with schizophrenia is truly painful. This is why experts have been looking for more effective ways to treat and understand the disorder.
Digging Deeper Into The Biological Cause Of Schizophrenia
A new study featured in the journal Nature has moved scientists closer to comprehending the biological cause of the brain disorder.
The findings may probably not open up new schizophrenia treatments soon, but they do provide experts with their first biological handle on a disorder that has baffled modern science for years.
The research team pieced together the steps by which genes increase a person's risk of developing schizophrenia. The risk is tied to brain pruning, a natural process that involves the reorganization of brain cell networks.
During pruning, extra and unnecessary neurons that are no longer useful in the brain are removed. It weeds out weak neural connections.
Pruning often occurs during early childhood and puberty, and it helps sculpt the adolescent brain into its adult form. Scientists said the process takes place in the prefrontal cortex where planning and thinking skills are centered.
People whose genes intensify or accelerate pruning are at greater risk of developing schizophrenia than those who do not, researchers said.
Other experts suspect that pruning must somehow get skewed in people with schizophrenia, because research suggests that their prefrontal cortex tended to have a reduced number of neural connections compared with unaffected people.
The new study strongly supports that this is true, describes how pruning goes awry and why, and identifies the genes responsible for it. People with schizophrenia contain a gene variant that facilitates aggressive "tagging" of neural connections for pruning, thus accelerating the process.
"This work is extremely persuasive but any step forward is not only rare and unusual, it's just one step in a journey of a thousand miles," said Dr. Samuel Barondes, a professor of psychiatry at the University of California, San Francisco.
Still, the findings of the study are particularly promising, experts said.
"They did a phenomenal job. This paper gives us a foothold, something we can work on, and that's what we've been looking for now, for a long, long time," said genetics professor David B. Goldstein of Columbia University.
The study was conducted by experts from Boston Children's Hospital, the Broad Institute and Harvard Medical School.
Past Studies
Almost coincidentally, a past study published in 2015 almost had the same results with the new study. The only difference is that the 2015 study specifically looked into brain immune system cells called microglia.
The 2015 study revealed that the relationship between the severity of schizophrenia and the activity levels of microglia in the brain are directly proportional. The more severe a person's schizophrenia is, the more active the microglia are.
Before this study, it was unknown whether microglia became active before the onset of the disorder or after its beginning. Their discovery had also changed the way experts viewed schizophrenia.
