KYOTO UNIVERSITY IMAGE: ABNORMALITIES IN THE CHOLESTEROL TRANSPORT PROTEIN ABCA13 HAVE BEEN SHOWN TO LEAD TO SCHIZOPHRENIA IN A MOUSE MODEL. CREDIT: MINDY TAKAMIYA/KYOTO UNIVERSITY ICEMS Scientists have suspected mutations in a cellular cholesterol transport protein are associated with psychiatric disorders, but have found it difficult to prove this and to pinpoint how it happens....
by University of Tsukuba Credit: University of Tsukuba Although schizophrenia is increasingly understood as a neurodevelopmental disorder, environmental factors are known to play an important role in the disease onset and progression. But now, researchers from Japan have found that exercise during a specific postnatal period may prevent the development of behaviors associated with schizophrenia. In...
by Mike Addelman, University of Manchester Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain A study by clinical scientists at the University of Manchester has shown that schizophrenia may—in some part—be caused by disordered functioning of the immune system. The first ever trial in schizophrenia of the powerful immune suppressant drug, Methotrexate, produced what the team described as ‘promising’ effects on what...
by University of Tsukuba Credit: University of Tsukuba Although schizophrenia is increasingly understood as a neurodevelopmental disorder, environmental factors are known to play an important role in the disease onset and progression. But now, researchers from Japan have found that exercise during a specific postnatal period may prevent the development of behaviors associated with schizophrenia. In...
by Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain imaging technologies allow for the study of differences in brain activity in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The image shows two levels of the brain, with areas that were more active in healthy controls than in schizophrenia patients shown in orange, during an fMRI...
Researchers have found that a common genetic deletion increases the risk of schizophrenia by 30-fold. Generating nerve cells with the deletion has showed the researchers why that is. When nerve cells aren’t busy exchanging information, they’re supposed to keep quiet. If they’re just popping off at random, like in a noisy classroom, it obscures the signals they’re supposed...
by Iqbal Pittalwala, University of California – Riverside Confocal image of a mouse brain tissue shows the astrocytes (red) and neurons (green). Credit: Ethell lab, UC Riverside. A team led by a biomedical scientist at the University of California, Riverside has found a new mechanism responsible for the abnormal development of neuronal connections in the...
by Nicole Feldman, University of California, Irvine Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and other brain imaging technologies allow for the study of differences in brain activity in people diagnosed with schizophrenia. The image shows two levels of the brain, with areas that were more active in healthy controls than in schizophrenia patients shown in orange,...
by Brandie Jefferson, Washington University in St. Louis “Older adults might be representing events in different ways, and transitions might be picked up differently than, say, a 20-year-old,” said Zachariah Reagh, assistant professor of psychological and brain sciences in Arts & Sciences. Reagh looked at fMRI images to study memory differences in different age groups....
by University College London A single dose of cannabidiol (CBD) helped increase blood flow to the hippocampus, an important area of the brain associated with memory and emotion, finds a new study led by UCL researchers. Researchers say the findings could be an important discovery for conditions which affect memory, such as Alzheimer’s disease and...
