Physical evidence in the brain for types of schizophrenia

Physical evidence in the brain for types of schizophrenia

by Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

n a study using brain tissue from deceased human donors, Johns Hopkins Medicine researchers say they found new evidence that schizophrenia can be marked by the buildup of abnormal proteins similar to those found in the brains of people with such neurodegenerative disorders as Alzheimer's or Huntington's diseases.

Schizophrenia—the specific cause of which remains generally unknown, but is believed to be a combination of genes and environment—is a disabling mental disorder marked by jumbled thinking, feeling and behavior, as well as delusions or hallucinations. Striking an estimated 200,000 people in the United States each year, its symptoms may be eased with anti-psychotic medications, but the drugs don't work for everyone. Rather than rely on categorizing by symptoms, researchers have long sought to better classify types of schizophrenia—such as those in which abnormal proteins appear to accumulate—as a potential way to improve and tailor therapies as precision medicine. The researchers aren't sure how common this variation of the disorder is, although they did find it in about half of the brain samples analyzed.

The new findings were published online May 6 in the American Journal of Psychiatry.