The hidden side of Schizophrenia By Katherine Lightwood

The hidden side of Schizophrenia 

By Katherine Lightwood

Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that has been fascinating scientists for years because we just don't understand it. But now we may have finally found the roots of this devastating disorder it starts from the brain when the brain is forming in the womb.

Schizophrenia causes people to hallucinate, have a distorted view of reality and experience extremely disordered thinking. Brain function can be badly affected that it's disabling. Symptoms usually appear in adolescence and young adulthood. And while some research has suggested a link between schizophrenia drug usage, and trauma, it has never been well understood. Because of the symptoms appear later in life the researchers have long assumed the root cause is a mix of genetic, brain chemistry and environmental factors.

In the past patients, patients have been misdiagnosed and mistreated and sometimes even being jailed. But new technologies have helped us understand what's really going on. Medical imaging has shown that a patient with schizophrenia has a brain and central nervous system that looks different than unaffected patients. There are hundreds of genetic mutations that might cause schizophrenia but scans all show that the affected brain shares the same "faulty genetic pathway".It's clear from the mountain evidence that the schizophrenia is a brain disease. Armed with this information the researchers turned to consider how that one pathway can be consistently faulty among so many patients.

A strange experiment was done by some researchers where they grew mini brain structures in a lab. Specifically, they grew cerebral organoids recreating the first phases of human brain development using the skin cells from the test subject. Only a few of them have schizophrenia whereas others don't have. The cells grew into tiny organs that mimicked brains in the first 12 weeks of pregnancy. And the mini brains have grown from schizophrenic patients showed critical malformations in the cortex that controls things like memory attention and cognition. The cells that become neurons aren't distributed normally.

The mini brain showed that there would be too few mature neurons in the cortex for a normal functionality when a fetus becomes a full grown adult. this results suggested that schizophrenia might likely start in the first trimester of pregnancy. The cells that develop into neurons don't connect the same way in a schizophrenic cortex as they do in an unaffected one.

If your bain was a computer a brain with schizophrenia would be improperly wired. So, the cliche is right. 

So, that was my thought of the day. To see more posts like this make sure to visit our main page. And Do not forget to visit our institute's page to know more about graphic design, 3D, animation courses and other awesome stuff. Till then good day to you.

Katherine Lightwood