In a new study on one of the most complex mental disorders known to man published in the journal Nature Genetics, researchers have uncovered over 22 locations in the human genome linked to the mental and brain disorder of schizophrenia, including 13 that are newly discovered, Red Orbit reports.
A disorder characterized by the breakdown of thought and emotional processes, symptoms of schizophrenia often include auditory and visual hallucinations, paranoia, delusions, and disorganized thought and speech patterns. The disorder has long been a public health concern across the world, as scientists try and understand the origins of the illness how to best treat it.
In the latest study, which included an analysis of a comprehensive genome-wide association study (GWAS) and similar reports, an international research team was led by Patrick F. Sullivan, MD, professor in the departments of Genetics and Psychiatry and director of the Center for Psychiatric Genomics at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine. Sullivan's team studied data from a Swedish national sample of over 5,000 cases of schizophrenia in addition to more than 6,200 controls, a total of 59,000 individuals involved, and what they uncovered was groundbreaking.
"If finding the causes of schizophrenia is like solving a jigsaw puzzle, then these new results give us the corners and some of the pieces on the edges," Sullivan said in a press release. "We've debated this for a century, and we are now zeroing in on answers."
Sullivan and his team identified the genes CACNA1C and CACNB2, which are critical to nerve cell functioning, as well as the 'micro-RNA 137' pathway, a genetic mechanism that regulates neuron development.
"What's really exciting about this is that now we can use standard, off-the-shelf genomic technologies to help us fill in the missing pieces," Sullivan said. "We now have a clear and obvious path to getting a fairly complete understanding of the genetic part of schizophrenia. That wouldn't have been possible five years ago."
Earlier this month, a similar study on the disease, published in the journal Neuron, revealed that the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia are caused by a "faulty switch" in the brain which causes sufferers to confuse objective reality with their own internal thoughts and delusions.
"In our daily life, we constantly switch between our inner, private world and the outer, objective world," Lena Palaniyappan, a Nottingham University psychiatrist who co-led the study, explained to Reuters. "This switching action is enabled by the connections between the insula and frontal cortex. [But] this switch process appears to be disrupted in patients with schizophrenia."
As there is still so much left to understand about the brain, studies such as these are essential in paving the way for future research on dehabilitating mental and brain disorders such as schizophrenia and and related schizoeffective disorders.
