Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a mental illness that affects only a small portion of the world's population, a mere 1%. As one of the more severe mental illnesses, schizophrenia if left untreated can have pretty noticeable symptoms that can interfere with one's daily life, causing many debilitating problems for the sufferer.

Though only 1% of the population suffers from schizophrenia, it is highly probably that in close, biological families, schizophrenia will be present more often than individual people that are unrelated. For example, there is a 45% chance of both siblings that are identical twins will both suffer from schizophrenia. Within this same spectrum are fraternal twins with a 10% chance of this disease occurring in both siblings.

It is not only possible for genetics to play a part in causing this disease; it is possible that early developmental trauma can lead to this disease becoming prevalent within its host. Infections that appear early in a child's life, autoimmune reactions, toxins, and traumatic injury, as well as stress can all be causes of schizophrenia in patients because it is affecting the natural course of neurodevelopment which then leads to genetic susceptibility. We also fund that there is a vulnerability to patients due to regions on the chromosomes that are abnormal.

Schizophrenia causes the cerebral cortex to be abnormally small and the cerebral ventricles to be abnormally large. Though brain damage is not equally distributed over the entire brain, certical damage is the most prevalent in the prefrontal, cingulated, and medial temporal areas of the cortex, all present in the schizophrenic patients. The big question is, are schizophrenics already born with brain damage or do they sustain this damage over a period of time? This might be something that can never be answered, how would we determine this? By checking every single baby and then monitoring them throughout their teenage years for symptoms?

What symptoms do we look for? According to the Mayo Clinic, though there are many different kinds of schizophrenia, there are general symptoms that are apparent: delusions, hallucinations, incoherent speech, neglect of personal hygiene, lack of emotions or a response of inappropriate emotions, angry outbursts, catatonic behavior, feelings of conspiracy, social isolation, and clumsy, uncoordinated movements.

Antipsychotics or neuroleptics do not completely help all schizophrenics, in fact 30% are not helped at all. The remainders only gain relief for some of the symptoms and not all. Neuroleptics are more effective in positive schizophrenics, their symptoms are lessened for things incoherence, hallucinations, and delusions. Perhaps the reason why the negative schizophrenic symptoms are not as easily calmed is because they are brain damaged?

Drug therapies can definitely help to alleviate the symptoms that occur within the patient, however some of these drugs were discovered by accident. Chlorpromazine was created in the 1950's originally as an antihistamine. A French surgeon later noticed that his psychotic patients appeared to be calm and easy to control. It was then discovered that agitated schizophrenic patients were calmed by this medication and the emotionally blunted patients were activated by it. This medication definitely helped to reduce the severity of the symptoms. During this time period, reserpine was also created to help with illnesses; however it produced a dangerous reduction in the blood pressure when taken at the dosage needed to treat schizophrenia.

Chlorpromazine and resperine both worked after 2 to 3 weeks from the time patients first started taking this medication, however these medications produced side effects that were similar to Parkinson's disease. The whole research behind Parkinson's disease lead way to the dopamine theory. Many Parkinson's patients that had died exhibited depleted dopamine in their striatums. This brought a new question, did too much dopamine cause schizophrenia? This simple question was the basis of the dopamine theory. If this were the case, anti-schizophrenic medications should decrease the dopamine levels and reduce the symptoms.

There are two establishing facts when it comes to schizophrenia, first resperine depletes the brain's levels of dopamine and autoamines by breaking down synaptic vesicles in which they are stored and which protected them degrading enzymes. Also, drugs like cocaine and amphetamine can trigger schizophrenic episodes.

There are treatments that help schizophrenic patients to lessen their symptoms: aripiprazole, clozapine, ziprasidone, resperidone, quetiapine, and olanzapine. By treating schizophreniacs, we can help them to stay part of the world and not worry about being as affected by their symptoms. Hough there aren't many people that suffer from this mental illness, the symptoms are pretty apparent and this disease is fairly well known among those that have never known someone that suffered from it. Even though the medication was, for the most part, an accident they have paved the way to alleviating the symptoms and their severity.