Schizophrenia - More than meets the eye

Schizophrenia. The word tends to conjure a wide range of images, from hearing voices to extreme paranoia. Symptoms of schizophrenia are diverse and include false beliefs, paranoia and unclear thinking. You may have been introduced to the disorder in the film A Beautiful Mind, where mathematician John Nash is diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. Figure 1: A self portrait of a person with schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is obviously much more complicated than what is portrayed in the movie, but until recently we understood very little about it's biological basis. Researchers from the Washington University in St. Louis have recently discovered that schizophrenia is actually a collection of eight different disorders, each with a unique genetic profile. This is very exciting, as this new outlook on schizophrenia will allow psychiatrists to tailor more focused treatments to patients with specific subsets of the disorder.

I think that it's very common for us as humans to desire a simple association between a disease and its cause. With the advent of cheaper forms of genetic sequencing, it is quickly becoming clear that many human disorders (both mental and physical) have very complex genetic causes. Personalized medicine, or using each person's unique genetic signature to craft patient specific treatments, is something that I think will quickly become the norm in modern healthcare within the next few decades.

Remember: our knowledge of many diseases often represents just the tip of the iceberg! There is still so much to learn, which makes science a very exciting frontier to explore!

For more information on schizophrenia, take a look at this primer from the National Institute of Mental Health.