No easy solution to schizophrenia puzzle
In any year, about 2.4 million Americans suffer from schizophrenia. They experience hallucinations, delusions and disorganized thinking, and are at risk for unusual or bizarre behaviors. The illness can be devastating to families and has enormous public health costs.
While reasons for the disease remain a mystery, people with schizophrenia have high rates of rare genetic deletions and duplications that likely disrupt the developing brain, according to new research from the UW and Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories.
Tiny anomalies were found in 15 percent of adult-onset schizophrenia patients and 20 percent of child- and adolescent-onset patients, compared with only 5 percent of healthy participants. Collectively, the mutations carried by patients were significantly more likely than those in healthy participants to disrupt genes involved in brain development—potentially implicating hundreds of genes in the illness.
Some researchers have been looking for certain suspect genes as the culprits, but the UW / Cold Spring research suggests that schizophrenia is caused by many different mutations in many different genes, with each mutation leading to a disruption in key pathways important to a developing brain. The mutations were often specific to single cases or families.
The team of investigators is led by Tom Walsh, Jon McClellan and Mary-Claire King at the UW, and Shane McCarthy and Jonathan Sebat at Cold Spring.