The discovery of a physical interaction between two proteins in brain cells that can be traced in mice to control of movement, anxiety and memory could one day open the door to development of new schizophrenia treatment strategies, researchers say ..read more

Schizophrenia is a severe neuropsychiatric disease that remains poorly understood and treated. Schizophrenia onset is typically in adolescence or early adulthood, but its underlying causes are thought to involve neurodevelopmental abnormalities. Because human prenatal and postnatal brain tissue is exceedingly difficult to procure and therefore study, researchers have had limited opportunities to identify early disease mechanisms, especially during the critical prenatal period. Now, a pair of studies use new technology to study schizophrenia in models of early human brain development ..read more

Schizophrenia, a neurodevelopmental disorder that features psychosis among its symptoms, is thought to arise from disorganization in brain connectivity and functional integration. Now, a new study finds differences in functional brain connectivity in people with and without psychosis and schizophrenia that could help researchers understand the neural underpinnings of this disease ..read more

Scientists have developed new tools, based on AI language models, that can characterize subtle signatures in the speech of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia ..read more

Scientists are figuring out which of the 5,000 variants associated with schizophrenia have an actual causal effect in the development of the condition that affects millions of people worldwide ..read more

Researcher discovers possible link of mitochondrial function to the development of schizophrenia ..read more

As a psychiatric disorder with onset in adulthood, schizophrenia is thought to be triggered by some combination of environmental factors and genetics, although the exact cause is still not fully understood. Researchers have now found a correlation between schizophrenia and somatic copy-number variants, a type of mutation that occurs early in development but after genetic material is inherited. This study is one of the first to rigorously describe the relationship between somatic -- not inherited -- genetic mutations and schizophrenia risk ..read more

Links have been reported between schizophrenia and proteins produced by the immune system that can act against one's own body, known as autoantibodies. Researchers have now identified autoantibodies that target a 'synaptic adhesion protein' in a subset of patients with schizophrenia. When injected into mice, the autoantibodies caused many schizophrenia-related changes ..read more

Neuroscientists have shown how vitamin D deficiency affects developing neurons in the brain's dopamine circuit, which may lead to the dopamine dysfunction seen in adults with schizophrenia ..read more

Scientists have found a lipid transporter crucial to regulating the cells that make myelin, the nerve-protecting sheath ..read more