Washington, July 03: In a landmark finding a team of international scientists have identified the immune system link to schizophrenia, the devastating mental disease thought to be caused by the interaction of both genetic and environmental factors.
The researchers also showed the condition is genetically similar to bipolar disorder also known as manic depression.
In follow up to their earlier work that identified three gene locations that may be implicated in schizophrenia, the group of researchers at University of California – Los Angeles (UCLA) along with other international scientists for the first time identified additional genes that confirms the role of the immune system in the development of the disorder, a release by the university said.
Further, they have also identified genetic anomalies that disrupt the cellular pathways involved in brain development, memory and cognition, all markers of schizophrenia, a common form of mental illness, affecting up to 1 per cent of adults worldwide.
“This is another step forward in understanding the biological basis of this disorder, one that robs people of their lives,” said Roel Ophoff, the co-lead author of the research, which appears in the latert July online edition of the journal Nature.
“It also shows the importance of worldwide collaborations for the study of schizophrenia genetics, because it allows us to do very large numbers of scans,” said Ophoff, an assistant professor at the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
The findings suggest that schizophrenia is much more complex than previously thought, and can arise not only from rare genetic variants, but common ones as well. Symptoms tend to appear in late adolescence or early adulthood, and can include delusions, hallucinations, paranoia, and depression. It is hoped the work could lead to new diagnostic tests and treatments for the condition.
Ophoff and his collaborators from nearly 50 institutions worldwide performed a genome-wide scan of 2,663 people diagnosed with schizophrenia and 13,498 controls from eight European locations, the release said.
They found significant associations with genetic markers on the Major Histocompatibility Complex (MHC), a group of genes that controls several aspects of the immune response. Further, they discovered additional variations in two other genes, called NRGN and TCF4, which points to perturbation of pathways involved in brain development, memory and cognition, it said.
“The three common genetic variants we describe, then, which we feel predisposes certain individuals to schizophrenia, have the potential to be translated into targets for the development of new and novel medications,” Ophoff said.
-Agencies