Schizophrenia: The Underlying Neural Mechanisms

Schizophrenia. Only a miniscule one percent of the population, on average, is effected by this neurological disorder. Equally miniscule is the general understanding of the disorder. One aspect of the experiment conducted by Sarah Hart, Joshua Bizzell, Mary McMahon, Hongbin Gu, Diana Perkins, and Aysenil Berger was to broaden and deepen the understanding of schizophrenia as well as defining symptom markers to more easily identify the disease in children and adolescents who have a familial high risk for schizophrenia.

To begin, the major purpose of this study, defined by the experimenters, was to identify functional diversity amongst the executive and emotional processing areas of the brain, which maturate with cortical areas of the brain in adolescents. Adolescents being the age in which symptoms of schizophrenia tend to emerge, the naturally arising inquiry becomes that of: do individuals with a familial high risk for schizophrenia show a development of the disorder through differences in fronto-striatal-limbic activity when compared to those who do not have a familial high risk? The answer to this question is equivalent to the hypothesis for the experiment. Given that a widely considered cause of schizophrenia is inefficient cortical -processing, the experimenters believe the participants who have a familial high risk would present signs of hyperactivation in the fronto-striatal-limbic circuitry relative to the control group (those who do not have a familial high risk), due to the brain compensating for loss of brain tissue.

Secondly, in order to conduct the experiment, the experimenters had to operationally define who someone with a familial high risk for schizophrenia exactly was. Familial high risk was defined as having a f...

... middle of paper ...

... in terms of understanding schizophrenia as a disorder. In order to solve a problem, on must first understand what is causing the problem. Once fully understood, the next step can be taken in creating a cure or improved medications for schizophrenic patients. This experiment did not solve the answer for how to cure schizophrenia; it did however, take an important and necessary step in increasing the understanding of what areas are possibly effected by schizophrenia early on in life. This information creates new pathways for more research to be conducted in the future and takes one step closer in formulating a cure.

Works Cited

Belger, Aysenil, Sarah Hart, Joshua Bizzel, Mary McMahon, Hongbin Gu, and Diana Perkins.

"Altered fronto–limbic activity in children and adolescents with familial high risk for schizophrenia." Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging: 19-27. Web.