Why does schizophrenia happen, and how can we improve treatment for it? These basic questions persist despite years of research on one of the most puzzling, and debilitating, mental illnesses.
Now, a University of Michigan Medical School team and their colleagues will take a new approach to addressing these questions by searching for genetic clues in postmortem brain tissues of people with and without schizophrenia.
Instead of hunting for genetic problems that these individuals inherited from their parents, they’ll be zeroing in on defects that arose during the individual’s life – which a growing number of scientists think may be crucial to understanding many disorders, including schizophrenia.
Their work will be fueled by a $3.86 million, five-year grant from the National Institutes of Health, in collaboration with researchers at the Lieber Institute for Brain Development and the Salk Institute for Biological Studies.
Together they’ll tackle the issue of “mosaicism” in schizophrenia — the idea that changes in the DNA of a person’s individual brain cells, or in the DNA of their neural stem cells that give rise to brain cells, may contribute to schizophrenia.
http://www.uofmhealth.org/news/archive/201505/schizophrenia-mosaic-u-m-team-receives-38m-grant-study