Testing a Simple Strategy To Prevent Schizophrenia via Dietary Supplements
The strategy involves providing expecting mothers with supplements of choline, an essential nutrient that plays an outsized role in the fetal brain while it is developing in the womb. The fetal brain is hyperactive as it assembles itself. “It just fires up all of its nerve cells, no inhibition whatsoever,” Dr. Freedman says. “Of the 20,000 genes we humans have, more are devoted to building the brain than anything else. And most of them are most active—about tenfold more— before birth compared with after.”
Watch as Dr. Freedman presents webinar titled:
Could We Someday Prevent Schizophrenia Like We Prevent Cleft Palate?
Just before birth all this activity needs to quiet down, however. “The brain is settling down,” Dr. Freedman explains. “This turns out to be the final step right before delivery, the last of five or six distinct steps which correspond with major changes in brain organization.” In each step, he says, “you not only get more memory and more function—as you do each time you upgrade your computer—but you also install a new operating system. In the early brain, each operating system is installed by the one that came before it.”
Dr. Freedman’s research focuses on one of the earliest operating systems, which unlike the others that follow it, “hangs around to do the very last installation.” This final step in the pre-birth developmental program makes normal inhibition possible.
Evidence shows that in infants who go on to develop schizophrenia, the brain’s inhibitory system does not establish itself as robustly as it should. The results are evident to those who treat and spend time with patients, including Dr. Freedman, still an active clinician.