Genetics of Schizophrenia

[PointRadix]

Science Signaling, 29 April 2008

Although complex disorders such as schizophrenia have a heritable component, identifying the genetic components associated has been very difficult. Researchers have found that multiple, individually rare, structural mutations (genomic micro-deletions and -duplications) occurred more frequently in 150 individuals with schizophrenia than in controls.

The enrichment was more than threefold among schizophrenia cases generally and more than fourfold among schizophrenia cases with onset by age 18. The genes disrupted by the genomic breakpoints of mutations in the schizophrenia patients were not random but were disproportionately members of pathways controlling neuronal signaling and brain development.

Source: Genetics of Schizophrenia -- Jasny 1 (17): ec149 -- Science Signaling

[Lutiferre]

Schizophrenia is a diagnosis, not a sickness. The difference is between learning its nature, which is diagnosis, and the root of this, which cannot be found easily nor spoken of generally, even when it is correlated with something where there is not causality. I find it amazing that these .. medical researchers keep trying to find some magic correlation, and on the same time the media keep sucking it up as the "cause" of the "disease".

It is too wide of a category to find any single cause for it, or an absolutely limited amount of causes.

Any cause that results in the criteria for the diagnosis is a cause of the disease - thus there is no one cause. Lets see some of the criteria for this diagnosis.

A. Characteristic symptoms: Two (or more) of the following, each present for a significant portion of time during a 1-month period (or less if successfully treated):
(1) delusions
(2) hallucinations
(3) disorganized speech (e.g., frequent derailment or incoherence)
(4) grossly disorganized or catatonic behavior
(5) negative symptoms, i.e., affective flattening, alogia, or avolition

Finding a major cause of subjects exerting such symptoms is no wrong - but the media, and perhaps some "scientists", simply dont understand the inabsoluteness of the matter.