Scientists Find Biological Cause For Schizophrenia
This is just something that I wrote up in class. I will post the instructions for the paper as an attachment.
Also I need an annotated bibliography for this assignment. Thank you for all of your help!!!
This topic interests me because my cousin Zachary actually suffers from this illness. He started experiencing the symptoms when he was 19 years old. It took them years to find him the right medication and he is able to live a healthy normal life again. They went through so much trial and error finding him the right medication, every case is different.
Scientist might have hit a turning point and found the biological cause of schizophrenia. There is a new study that shows the disorder is linked to a physical process where connections between parts of the brain are “pruned” away.
The finding could lead scientists to be able to work out a way of treating the disease at its source, rather than just reducing the symptoms. It might even be discovered that Schizophrenia could be triggered by an infectious agent.
According to the study, when people are going through adolescence their brains are re-wired in a way that sees some synapses cut away. There is a gene that leads some people’s brains to prune away too much, this leads to presentations of schizophrenia.
The extreme “pruning” can bring on symptoms of schizophrenia, which can be hugely debilitating and lead people to lose their grip on reality and see delusions and they experience paranoia as well.
Lead researchers have said that schizophrenia’s underlying biology has been a black box, it has been virtually impossible to model the disorder in cells or animals. The human genome is providing a new way in to this disease.
Understanding these genetic effects on risk is a way of prying open that black box, peering inside, and starting to see actual biological mechanisms. The gene is called C4. It is an important part of the immune system, and finds infectious microbes — this has led scientists to wonder whether schizophrenia might be triggered by one of them.
