Schizophrenia is a disease of many known and many unknown variables. For researchers, the general public, people living with the disease, and their loved ones, these knowns and unknowns can be very frustrating. Everyday, people question how schizophrenia develops, what is happening in the brain, how to treat it, and how much it impacts daily life.
The Known
Affecting about 2.6 million adults in the United States, schizophrenia is a mental disorder that presents in a person’s late teens to early 20s. With schizophrenia, there are often positive, negative, and cognitive symptoms. Positive symptoms often respond well to anti-psychotic medication and include hallucinations, delusions, and disordered thoughts and speech. Negative symptoms are more difficult to treat and include lack of emotion, decreased motivation, inability to experience pleasure and other similar mood changes. Cognitive deficits from schizophrenia are considered to be the core of the disease and are associated with troubles with memory, information processing, and decision making skills.
Learning about and witnessing this crippling disorder make the scientific and general communities interested in how to prevent and/or cure schizophrenia. It is known that dopamine, an excitatory neurotransmitter, levels are high in people with schizophrenia and dopamine excess is the target of many anti-psychotics which helps with the positive symptoms explained above. One major problem with the treatment for schizophrenia is that it is very difficult to treat the negative and cognitive symptoms The slowed advancements in this field are the result of the lack of understanding exactly how this disease impacts the brain. With the inability to fully understand the disease comes the inability to treat or prevent it.
Science has discovered many possible causes for the development of schizophrenia including genetic predisposition, infection during fetal development, and many other developmental abnormalities, but the cause is likely a combination of a person’s biological makeup and various events that happen during their development.
The Unknown
In the brains of people living with schizophrenia, there is a pathway called the WnT and GSK3 signalling pathway that researchers have found to have a major role in this disease.This pathway may offer explanation or treatment for more symptoms associated with the disease. WnT signalling is important in neurons because the activation of WnT receptors prevents the destruction of transcription factors that are necessary for proper cell development and function. When this pathway is disrupted, as it seems to be in schizophrenia, gene transcription in cells is inhibited. This means that this disrupted signalling pathway is a key factor in the development of symptoms.
This pathway is a possible explanation for the symptoms of schizophrenia beyond the hallucinations, delusions, and other positive symptoms. Researchers are trying to develop drug treatments that could minimize the damaging effects that this pathway has on neurons. Though drugs targeting the WnT pathway are still in their earlier stages, the idea of their success is promising. Treatment for the entire spectrum of schizophrenia symptoms could mean a much better quality of life for people living with the disease and those around them as well. Further understanding of this pathway also could help pinpoint the causes of schizophrenia and aid to eventually lower the number of people affected by this debilitating disorder.
Once again, I’m amazed and the idea that researchers are coming closer to understanding this seemingly impossible disease makes me love science even more.
