Brains of Healthy Sibs May Reveal New Clues to Schizophrenia

That is the title of this article I am reviewing today."Comparing the brains of schzophrenia patients to healthy siblings may reveal significant clues to the debilitating disease, according to a new study at Michigan State University. The research is the first to look at the neurotransmitters glutamate and gamma-aminobutyric acidergic (GABA) with a noninvasive imaging test called magnetic resonance spectroscopy in both schizophrenia patients and the healthy siblings of schizophrenia patients.

Glutamate promotes the firing of brain cells, and GABA inhibits this neural firing. They work hand in hand to regulate brain function. At this time, most schizophrenia drugs regulate dopamine, another neurotransmitter in the brain; however, these medications do not work for everyone. Many researchers believe there are multiple risk factors for the illness, including imbalances in both dopamine and glutamate/GABA, and this has been confirmed by several studies. However, the exact relationship has remained unclear. Currently there is no medication for schizophrenia that targets the glutamate/GABA system. In fact, medication for schizophrenia has changed very little in the past 50 years and remains somewhat limited in its effectiveness."Maybe they will come out with new medications that work for everyone who has this disease.  There are so many studies maybe one will help one of theses days.
The article goes on to say: "The study involved 21 patients with chronic schizophrenia, 23 healthy relatives (the relatives were siblings of other patients with schizophrenia, not the patients in the study) and a control group of 24 healthy subjects. It was performed in collaboration with researchers at the University Medical Center Utrecht in the Netherlands, where Thakkar served as a postdoctoral fellow. According to the findings, both schizophrenia patients and healthy relatives show reduced levels of glutamate. But while the patients also showed reduced levels of GABA, the relatives had normal amounts of the inhibitory neurotransmitter. This prompted the researchers to ask two questions: First, if glutamate is altered, why do these relatives not show symptoms of the illness? And, second, how did healthy relatives maintain normal levels of GABA even though they, like the patients, were genetically predisposed to schizophrenia and had altered glutamate levels?" I would say that the GABA is what causes schizophrenia maybe. Because it would seem the two go hand in hand in this study.
The article ends: "'This finding is what’s most exciting about our study,” said lead investigator Dr. Katharine Thakkar, Michigan State University assistant professor of clinical psychology. 'It hints at what kinds of things have to go wrong for someone to express this vulnerability toward schizophrenia.' 'The study gives us more specific clues into what kinds of systems we want to tackle when we’re developing new treatments for this very devastating illness.' The brain scan used in the study — which is conducted on a conventional MRI machine — could eventually help clinicians target more specific treatments. 'There are likely different causes of the different symptoms and possibly different mechanisms of the illness across individuals,' Thakkar said. 'In the future, as this imaging technique becomes more refined, it could conceivably be used to guide individual treatment recommendations. That is, this technique might indicate that one individual would benefit more from treatment A and another individual would benefit more from treatment B, when these different treatments have different mechanisms of action.'"That is what I say everyone is different so they would have different symptoms.  I still do not know if I will see treatments and what really causes this disease before I die.

Brains of Schizophrenia Patients May Be Reversing Effects of the Disease

That is the title of this article I am reviewing today. "The brains of patients with slchizophrenia may be trying to reorganize and fight the illness, according to a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) study conducted by an international team of scientists. This is the first time that imaging data has been used to show how our brains may have the ability to reverse the effects of schizophrenia. Although schizophrenia is generally associated with a widespread reduction in brain tissue volume, the new findings reveal a subtle and simultaneous increase in brain tissue in certain regions. The researchers followed 98 patients with schizophrenia and compared them to 83 patients without schizophrenia. Using MRI and a statistical approach called covariance analysis, the research team measured any increases in brain tissue. Due to the subtlety and the distributed nature of increase, this has not been demonstrated in patients until now."I would not know that last time I had a relapse was in 1994.  It was not as bad as the original illness that came on in 1988 although it was enough to send me back to the state hospital because it was worse each day.
The article goes on to say: "According to Lawson Health Research Institute’s Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, there is an overarching feeling that curing people with a severe mental illness, such as schizophrenia, is not possible. This stems from the long-held notion that schizophrenia is a degenerative illness, with the seeds of damage sown very early during the course of brain development. 'Even the state-of-art frontline treatments aim merely for a reduction rather than a reversal of the cognitive and functional deficits caused by the illness,' said Palaniyappan, medical director at the Prevention & Early Intervention Program for Psychoses (PEPP) at London Health Sciences Centre (LHSC). 'Our results highlight that despite the severity of tissue damage, the brain of a patient with schizophrenia is constantly attempting to reorganize itself, possibly to rescue itself or limit the damage,' said Palaniyappan.'" It makes me wonder about that psychiatrist who kept me without medication for six months or longer if I would have been so ill that I wonder if I started hearing voices for the first time at the state hospital.
The article ends: "The next step is to study the evolution of this brain tissue reorganization process by repeatedly scanning individual patients with early schizophrenia and to investigate the effect of this reorganization on their recovery. 'These findings are important not only because of their novelty and the rigour of the study, but because they point the way to the development of targeted treatments that potentially could better address some of the core pathology in schizophrenia,' said Dr. Jeffrey Reiss, Site Chief, Psychiatry, LHSC. The project is part of an international collaboration among scientists in Nottingham, UK, Shanghai and Changsha, People’s Republic of China, Robarts Research Institutes at Western University and Lawson Health Research Institute.'" Yeah it seems like they have to catch this disease early on to make this benefit if there is one.

Brain Structure Linked to Hallucinations

That is the title of this article I am reviewing today. "Scientists have uncovered differences in the brains of people with schizophrenia who do and do not have hallucinations. Dr. Jon Simons and colleagues at Cambridge University, UK, looked at structural MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) scans of 153 individual brains: 113 scans were from people with schizophrenia and 40 from similar participants without schizophrenia. Among the schizophrenia patients, 78 had a history of hallucinations and 34 did not. The team measured the length of the paracingulate sulcus (PCS), a fold toward the front of the brain, in each scan. This indicated a link between length of the PCS and the tendency to hallucinate. On average, the patients suffering hallucinations had a PCS that was about two centimeters shorter than those without hallucinations, and three centimeters shorter than the non-schizophrenic group. This suggests that a one centimeter reduction in the fold’s length is linked to a 20 percent rise in the chance of hallucinations. The association applied to both auditory and visual hallucinations. Dr. Simons explained that the team selected patients to put into each group such that those two groups were as directly comparable as possible. Factors such as age, sex, medication and even whether participants were left- or right-handed were all taken into account. 'So as close as we can get it,' Dr. Simons said, 'the only difference between those two groups is that one group experiences hallucinations and the other one doesn’t.' The team says this is consistent with an explanation based on “reality monitoring.” The PCS is thought to play a role in distinguishing self-generated information from that perceived in the outside world. Details are published in the journal Nature Communications. In scans of healthy people, Dr. Simons has previously found that variation in the length of the PCS was linked to reality monitoring. He says, 'Schizophrenia is a complex spectrum of conditions that is associated with many differences throughout the brain, so it can be difficult to make specific links between brain areas and the symptoms that are often observed.'" I heard voices I think after I was at the state hospital.  I had been left crazy since I was locked up because the psychiatrist did not  like me and would not help me.  I am not very sure if I heard voices or not.
The article goes on to say: "'By comparing brain structure in a large number of people diagnosed with schizophrenia with and without the experience of hallucinations, we have been able to identify a particular brain region that seems to be associated with a key symptom of the disorder.' Changes in other areas of the brain are likely also important in generating the complex phenomena of hallucinations, he adds. If further work shows that the difference can be detected before the onset of symptoms, it might be possible to offer extra support to people who face that elevated risk.
But hallucinations are just one of the main symptoms of schizophrenia, and patients are diagnosed on the basis of other irregular thought processes. Researcher Dr. Jane Garrison says the PCS is one of the last structural folds to develop in the brain before birth, and varies in size between individuals.
She adds, 'We think that the PCS is involved in brain networks that help us recognize information that has been generated ourselves. People with a shorter PCS seem less able to distinguish the origin of such information, and appear more likely to experience it as having been generated externally.
'Hallucinations are very complex phenomena that are a hallmark of mental illness and, in different forms, are also quite common across the general population. There is likely to be more than one explanation for why they arise, but this finding seems to help explain why some people experience things that are not actually real.'" I have never experienced nothing that is not real.  It would be hard for people that did not to know that what you are hearing or visualizing is not real.
The article ends with: "The team concludes that, 'To be able to pin such a key symptom to a relatively specific part of the brain is quite unusual.' Commenting on the work, Professor Stephen Lawrie of the University of Edinburgh, UK, states, 'There’s quite a strong literature showing that auditory hallucinations are related to dysfunction or structural disruption in language areas of the brain. 'I think the value of this is that it probably helps us think slightly more broadly about hallucinations in schizophrenia, in terms of it not just being about language areas of the brain, but involving a more distributed network of regions, and implicating, in particular, cognitive control or higher-order cognitive functioning.' Professor Lawrie has also studied brain structure in relation to schizophrenia and hallucinations. He says the form and content of hallucinations can vary considerably between patients and believes that different brain changes may reflect these different processes. His work has found indications for a role for the lateral temporal cortex in hallucinations. This type of investigation 'may have relevance for the understanding of the biological basis of the disorder,' he concludes.'" It does have relevance for people that have theses problems when they have this disorder to understand what happened to them.  I do wish that I would like to know why this happened to me and why at that age besides the stress I was going through the first time and second time it happened.

Game your brain: the new benefits of neuroplasticity Part three

This is the third part of an article I am writing about.  “Last year, Gazzaley cofounded a company called Akili Interactive Labs, which is developing an upgrade of NeuroRacer called Evo.  Like Posit Science, Akili is seeking FDA approval for EVO as a possible software-based treatment for ADHD. ‘Most people associate medicine with drugs, and that’s the result of a big, successful brainwashing campaign by pharma companies,’ Gazzaley says. ‘But when it comes to brain health, drugs don’t work very well- - and the drug companies know that. If you look across the world’s top – ten pharma companies, four have withdrawn research from neuroscience.  That’s not because we’ve cured any of these diseases. Hopefully now we’ll start thinking of software and hardware as a form of medicine.’  Gazzaley has been preparing to open a new neuroscience laboratory at the University of California, San Francisco. ‘We’re going to be able to record real-time EEG data as you play one of our games,’ Gazzaley says.  ‘The challenge won’t just be correlated to your performance, but also directly by neural process in your brain.’ He gives Wired a copy of the November 2013 issue of the scientific journal Nature.  The cover headline is ‘Game Changer’ and the image shows the cartoon of an old balding man driving a car through NeuroRacer’s mountainous roads. ‘Before I’d developed NeuroRacer, I used to give talks to groups of colleagues and present my data on cognitive decline and its mechanisms, and they would love it, find it fascination.  But when I gave talks about it to a public audience of older people, like the American Association of Retired Persons, it was horrifying.  If you give a lot of talks you get good at reading subtle signs in the audience.  Every year at the AGM, I had over a thousand people in the audience, all grey, and at the end of my talk, I could just see them asking ‘Is this it?  Is this the end of the movie?’ There was this feeling like that was not really the right ending.’ He points to the Nature cover. ‘That is the right ending.’” It all sounds promising. It is the right ending if it can rewire the brain so that schizophrenics feel that they are doing better my having participated in sound research.
I will end this article with: “Older adults are often advised to keep their minds sharp, but such advice is so generally as to be useless.  ‘It’s true that we lose abilities as we get older, but I believe that most of that loss is driven by a lack of effort to sustain brain fitness,’ says Alvaro Pascual-Leone, a neurologist at Harvard Medical School and one of the most-cited scientists in the field of brain plasticity. ‘We’re lazy, we don’t get out of our comfort zones, we stop learning new things.  The fact is that whatever you do, from activities to relationships to thoughts, ultimately enters the brain and affects it.  But we can harness that property of the brain for our own benefit. Ultimately, it’s a message of hope for people.’  The science of neuroplasticity illuminates the dynamic evolution of our brains throughout life, documenting how different experiences can dramatically change it. Its most pertinent insight, however, is that we can take control of such transformation.  Merzenich’s and Gazzaley’s brain training exercises provide us with a tool to do it.  They are a gym for the brain, a place where we can go to strengthen and expand our cognitive capabilities, which, to a very large extent, define who we are and determine what we are capable of.” How far can we go?  Makes me which I was younger and get into a field where the possibilities are endless with the brain.  It is the new frontier.