Fresh Insight into Schizophrenia

MEG technique has been used by researchers to find two spectral features that are significantly different in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy control subjects.

Non-invasive magnetoencephalogram (MEG) technique has been used by researchers to find two spectral features that are significantly different in schizophrenia patients compared to healthy control subjects.

Furthermore, they found that there were four spectral features in the brain signals of schizophrenia patients that changed with age compared to healthy control subjects, suggesting that schizophrenia affects the way in which brain activity evolves with age.

About Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by symptoms of thought, behavior and social problems.

The study has been published today, Thursday 31 January, in the journal Physiological Measurement.

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric disorder, usually starting in late adolescence, which is characterised by a range of positive and negative symptoms, including hallucinations, delusions, paranoia, cognitive impairment, social withdrawal, self-neglect and loss of motivation and initiative.

It has no objective test and is currently diagnosed by clinicians who assess patients using a defined set of criteria.

Brain Depression
Interactive section of Medindia provides information about chemistry of Brain depression

Lead author of the study Dr Javier Escudero said: "At present, there is no blood, cerebrospinal fluid, brain imaging or neurophysiological test for schizophrenia in routine clinical practice. The diagnosis relies on the interpretation of symptoms and clinical history according to consensus criteria".

"The advent of an objective marker for schizophrenia would significantly facilitate the diagnosis and offer a better understanding of the neurobiological basis of the disease."

Rare Gene Mutation Identified in Development of Schizophrenia
A rare gene mutation in a single family with a high rate of schizophrenia identified by Johns Hopkins researchers adds to evidence that abnormal genes play a role in the development of schizophrenia.

In this study, the frequency spectrum of the MEG background activity was analysed in 15 schizophrenia patients with positive symptoms and 17 age-matched healthy control subjects.

A range of spectral features from the MEGs were analysed to provide a holistic view of the brain activity of each subject. The MEG produced 148 values for each subject, which were subsequently divided into five different groups representing different parts of the brain, and were statistically analysed.

New Approach to Schizophrenia Prevention
Choline supplementation given during the last two trimesters of pregnancy and in early infancy is found to lower the rate of physiological schizophrenic risk factors in infants 33 days old.

The researchers also investigated whether the spectral features could be used to distinguish between schizophrenia patients and the healthy controls. They showed that they were able to classify patients with 71 per cent accuracy.

"The long-term vision is to develop a low-cost, non-invasive and objective test to aid the diagnosis of this and other brain diseases. The magnetoencephalogram is able to provide very detailed information about the brain activity; however, it is expensive. Therefore, we aim to transfer these developments to electroencephalogram recordings in the future, as this technique meets those requirements of reduced cost, high availability and non-invasiveness," continued Dr Escudero.

Source-Eurekalert