The Basics
Symptoms of Schizophrenia can vary greatly in the ways they present themselves in different people. This mental disorder is defined as the abnormal interpretation of reality. The symptoms displayed in Schizophrenia include, hallucinations, delusions, extremely disordered thinking and behavior that impairs daily functioning. Hearing voices, impaired communication by disorganized speech, and lack of emotion or eye contact are common signs of Schizophrenia.
A major sign of Schizophrenia in the brain is a significant loss of gray matter in the medial and superior temporal regions as well as in the prefrontal region of the brain. Gray matter is crucial to the function of episodic memory, processing auditory information and short-term memory.
What’s going wrong in the brain?
In a properly functioning dopamine pathway, there is an enzyme that plays an important role in regulation and ensuring the desired outcomes of the pathway are occurring. This enzyme is called glycogen synthase kinase 3 (GSK3). The main problem in schizophrenia is the overactivation of GSK which leads to the symptoms experienced in the disorder. The dopamine pathway functions to activate GSK through with the help of another molecule, Akt which phosphorylates GSK to its active form. However, when there is too much dopamine signaling, it leads to the overactivation of GSK in this pathway.
The Wnt pathway is another place where GSK is being affected in schizophrenic brains. The dopamine receptors were also shown to inhibit Wnt signaling. This pathway works to regulate GSK by inactivating through the presence of ß-Catenin. When the balance of GSK is off and causing GSK to be overactive, that is when schizophrenia symptoms begin to develop.
Risk Factors
Having a family history of Schizophrenia is the highest risk factor and significantly increases the chances of developing this disorder. However, other environmental factors can also influence the likelihood of developing Schizophrenia. Experiencing trauma during one’s childhood can increase the risk for the development of Schizophrenia. Dopamine plays a role in interpreting threat-related stimuli, which can lead to the formation of delusions observed in schizophrenia. The increase of dopamine levels in people that have experienced traumatic events puts them at a higher risk of developing this disorder.
Additionally, there are some prenatal risks associated with the development of schizophrenia. If the mother is exposed to influenza during the first trimester, or acquires rubella or a respiratory infection, the chances of the child developing schizophrenia significantly increase. Migration is also a significant risk factor if people are migrating to regions where they are exposed to viruses that their bodies have not previously been exposed to.
Treatments
Current treatments of schizophrenia focus on treating the symptoms rather than the cause. This is because there is a significant deficit in the understanding of the biological mechanisms of the disease. Therefore, it is difficult to come up with something that targets what is still unknown. Medications used to treat schizophrenia work to inhibit GSK. Lithium is most commonly used because it directly inhibits the activation of GSK. Additionally, dopamine receptor blockers are used because too much dopamine is being produced so through inhibiting the dopamine pathway, the activation of GSK is inhibited.
