Babies whose mothers were exposed during pregnancy to stressors such as trauma, illness, alcohol, or drug abuse become susceptible to various psychiatric disorders later in life. Now, researchers think that it may be the stressor’s effect on single gene that gives rise to conditions such as schizophrenia, PTSD, autism, and bipolar disorders. The Yale University […]
By observing the eye movements of schizophrenia patients while they played a simple video game, a University of British Columbia researcher has discovered a potential explanation for some of their symptoms. Schizophrenia is a brain disorder affecting about one per cent of the population that often causes people to hear voices that others don’t hear […]
For people with schizophrenia, UK national treatment guidelines recommend group art therapy to improve mental health and social functioning, but a new study published in theBritish Medical Journal has found art therapy to be ineffectual. Schizophrenia affects as many as one in 100 people at some point in their lives. While antipsychotic medication can reduce […]
A computer network that emulates schizophrenia is providing University of Texas at Austin researchers with important insights into the inner workings of schizophrenic brains. Writing about their work in Biological Psychiatry, the researchers explain that the computer neural network they used simulated the excessive release of dopamine in the brain. “The hypothesis is that dopamine […]
The metabolic changes responsible for the evolution of human cognitive abilities indicate that the brain may have been pushed to the limit of its capabilities and that schizophrenia may be one of the costly by-products of this evolutionary leap, say scientists in the journalGenome Biology . The idea that some neurological diseases are the by-products […]
For the first time, scientists from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) have discovered epigenetic changes (chemical changes to a gene that do not alter the DNA sequence) in individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. The findings may be a significant step on the way to fully understanding major psychosis. CAMH’s Dr. Arturas […]
A new study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B tries to uncover why several genes with strong associations to schizophrenia have evolved rapidly thanks to positive selection during human evolution. The international team of geneticists found a higher prevalence of positive selection on genes known to be associated with the disorder than a […]
Two psychiatric conferences in Europe have been told that child abuse can cause schizophrenia. The man behind the contentious theory, University of Manchester researcher Paul Hammersley, described his theory as “an earthquake” that will radically change the psychiatric profession. Working in conjunction with New Zealand clinical psychologist Dr John Read, Hammersley gathered evidence from 40 […]
