What is Schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia is a developmental brain disorder in which people interpret reality differently than normal. This can result in hallucinations, delusions and disordered thinking and behavior.
What causes Schizophrenia?
A recent review article cites the Glutamate signaling system within the brain. This is the main excitatory pathway in the brain and it is believed to be overactive in the brain of people with schizophrenia. This over excitation causes normal stimuli to often be too much for people with schizophrenia to handle.
What is Sarcosine and what does it do?
Sarcosine is actually an amino acid that is naturally found within the human body. But besides just being an amino acid it also blocks glycine transporters in the brain. You see one of the main receptors in the Glutamate signaling system is the NMDA receptor. This receptor needs not only glutamate to fire but also needs to be in the presence of glycine. Without a transporter to bring the glycine to the NMDA receptor it cannot do its job. However in the case of schizophrenia the NMDA receptors appear to be working overtime and blocking the glycine transporter helps the receptors get on a regular schedule. On paper one would think that sarcosine would help the symptoms of schizophrenia and studies also agree. The cool thing about sarcosine is that it treats negative symptoms. Schizophrenia symptoms are broken up in to positive and negative symptoms. The positive symptoms are the hallucination type and the negative symptoms are essentially the cognitive decline part of schizophrenia. Until recently most treatments only treated the positive symptoms but studies show that taking sarcosine along with normal treatment can improve negative symptoms as well.
Sarcosine: Good News for Schizophrenia
