Study gives clues to biology of schizophrenia, may aid treatment

Scientists pursuing the biological roots of schizophrenia have zeroed in on a potential factor a normal brain process that gets kicked into overdrive. The finding could someday lead to ways to treat the disease or even prevent it.

Almost one percent of the general population will have schizophrenia at some point in their lives. They may hear voices or hallucinate, talk about strange ideas, and believe others are plotting against them. Nobody knows what causes the disorder, so the new result offers a possible peek into a black box. The work is reported in a paper released on Wednesday by the journal Nature.

The result links schizophrenia risk to a problem with a normal process that happens in adolescence and early adulthood, when disease symptoms often appear. That age range is when the brain trims back the number of specialised places on brain cells where the cells signal each other, called synapses. The new work suggests a connection to schizophrenia when this process gets out of hand, deleting too many synapses.

“It’s like you have a gardener who was supposed to prune the bushes and just got overactive,” said Bruce Cuthbert, said acting deputy director of the National Institute of Mental Health, which helped fund the research. “You end up with bushes that are pruned way too much,” he added.