The Origin of Schizophrenia

FROM DISCOVER MAGAZINE (2007)..The Origin of Schizophrenia... One day a girl named Elyn Saks was walking home from high school when she realized the houses lining the street was sending her messages, "Look closely," they said. The messages was telling her. "you are special... especially bad." In her first year of Vanderbilt University, she was hospitalized. She feared that her head was going to explode and take along thousands of innocent bystanders with it. She was diagnosed with schizophrenia (a genetically influenced disease that presents itself differently in everyone it attacks). This mental illness appears to have no discernible upside and offers little hope of resolution. A study, headed by neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University, say that schizophrenia is most likely related to the process of neuron creation. This revealed that a gene linked with schizophrenia, known as disrupted-in-schizophrenia 1 (DISC 1), regulates the migration of new neurons it the adult brain. Researchers used mice in an experiement, they reduced the levels of DISC1 in them during neurogenesis, the unborn neurons sped up and overshot their inteded targets within the hippocampus (area of the brain that holds memory, emotional processing, and social cognition). When the neurons reached their destinations, they formed an unusual number of connections with neighboring cells--a series of events that might raise the abnormal brain functions associated with schizophrenia, according to Hongjun Song. DISC1's apparent involvement in both neurogenesis and schizophrenia could help explain the persistance in this mental illness. It is possible, Song says, that further research will lead to a drug treating schizophrenia by restoring normal neurogenesis. Chapter 14.8 relates to this article on schizophrenia.