Wednesday, July 1, 2015

How learning and memory may be improved in schizophrenia

That is the title of this article I am writing about. "Institute-supported PhD student Natalie Matosin has been working on finding molecules in the brain that are altered in schizophrenia in order to identify new drug targets with the potential to improve the cognitive and negative symptoms associated with the disorder. Along with her supervisors, Dr Kelly Newell and Dr Francesca Fernandez, she has been looking specifically at a receptor in the brain, the metabotropic glutamate receptor 5, or mGluR5.
Together with NeuRA scientists, Dr Samantha Fung and Professor Cyndi Shannon Weickert, Ms Matosin and her team assessed the levels of mGluR5 in the postmortem brains of people that had schizophrenia, and found that in the frontal cortex and hippocampus there were greater numbers of the receptor mGluR5. Since these changes are in brain regions involved in learning and memory, this led our researchers to believe that these changes in mGluR5 might be contributing to the poor cognitive functioning seen in many people with schizophrenia." This sounds promising if it can help with memory and help with negative symptoms that would be great. Learning it was harder with this illness than when I did not have it even thought I feel I had symptoms of this illness growing up.
The article ends with: "In trying to understand why this receptor was expressed abnormally in schizophrenia brains, Ms Matosin, Dr Francesca Fernandez and the team worked with the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank and Associate Professor Melissa Green to better understand whether the dysregulation of the mGluR5 receptor might originate in the mGluR5 gene. They found markers within the gene that are associated with schizophrenia in men, and a complex relationship with measures of cognitive functions such as working memory and measures of IQ, which differently affect men and women with schizophrenia. This supports the idea that mGluR5 is involved in the development of cognitive dysfunction, particularly memory and learning, in people with schizophrenia.
'mGluR5 represents a valuable new drug target to treat the cognitive deficits in people with schizophrenia,” says Ms Matosin. “It’s likely that because every schizophrenia sufferer is an individual with their own set of symptoms and causes, that it will work only in a subset of people with schizophrenia. Therefore future studies will need to find a way to identify this subset, so that they can benefit from mGluR5-based treatments.'" That it will only work with certain people of this illness I believe.  My memory of numbers is still working good. I practice working on my memory so I do not know if I lose any or not. I just know that numbers I have always been great with.

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