People who develop schizophrenia may have been born with brains with a
different structure. The finding adds further support to the idea that
genetics can play a key role in schizophrenia, which involves delusions
and hallucinations and is often a lifelong condition once it develops.
Schizophrenia has been the subject of a fierce nature-versus-nurture debate: childhood abuse is linked with a raised risk of the condition, but 108 genes have been implicated, too.
Probing the biology of schizophrenia is difficult because brain
tissue sampled from people with the condition is rarely available to
study. Kristen Brennand of
the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York and her
colleagues got around this by taking skin cells from 14 people with
schizophrenia, and reprogramming them into stem cells and then nerve
cells.
They found that on average these nerve cells had lower levels of a
signalling molecule called miR-9 than similar cells developed from
people who do not have schizophrenia. A small string of nucleic acids,
miR-9 can change the activity of certain genes and is known to play a
role in how neurons develop in the fetus.
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https://www.newscientist.com/article/2085432-the-foundations-of-schizophrenia-may-be-laid-down-in-the-womb/
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