Category: Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that involves delusions, hallucinations, problems planning and remembering, paranoia and confused thinking.

People with schizophrenia do not attempt to control their stronger emotions in the usual way, a study finds.

Most people try to regulate stronger emotions towards ones they prefer: such as reducing intense fear, anger and anxiety.

For example, when feeling very anxious, most people will try to calm down using relaxing thoughts, deep breathing or any other coping strategy they have found to work.

However, people with schizophrenia make little attempt to regulate their emotions.

The conclusions come from a study that compared the emotional experience of people with schizophrenia to a healthy control group.

The extent of people’s feelings were rated on a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being the strongest emotions.

Mr Ian Raugh, the study’s first author, explained how healthy people react to more negative emotions:

“…as negative emotion increases, they’re more likely to manage that.

At lower levels, say 1 or 2, you’re probably not going to do anything to change it.

But as the level of negative emotion goes up, a healthy person is much more likely to engage in efforts to change how they are feeling.”

However, people with schizophrenia do not or cannot regulate strong emotions, Mr Raugh said:

“That’s really the abnormality, that people with schizophrenia don’t seem to be trying to manage their emotions as much when their emotions are really high.”

People with schizophrenia are exhausted

The stronger the negative emotions become, the less people with schizophrenia attempt to change their emotional state.

One reason may be that people with schizophrenia do not think it will help to try.

Mr Raugh said:

“The terms we use in psychology are ‘learned helplessness’ or ‘defeatists beliefs,’ where people think ‘oh it’s not going to work even if I try so why bother,’ which is common in depression as well.

And so, there’s that aspect probably driving less attempts at higher levels.”

Another reason may be that people with schizophrenia feel exhausted.

The effort of constantly trying to change negative emotions at low levels makes the effort at higher levels almost impossible.

Mr Raugh said:

“A lot of that comes down to they’re not regulating as much when it would be most advantageous to do so.

Our future studies will try to understand more about why they would regulate less at higher levels.”

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that involves delusions, hallucinations, problems planning and remembering, paranoia and confused thinking.

People with schizophrenia have symptoms such as:

• disorganised speech,
• disorganised behaviour and movement,
• not eating, bathing or functioning in daily life normally,
• appearing to lack emotions,
• social withdrawal,
• inability to experience pleasure,
• and suicidal thoughts.

Schizophrenia symptoms typically appear during the 20s, with the onset earlier in men than women.

Although it is not known what causes schizophrenia, it runs in families and certain factors, such as malnutrition and taking mind-altering drugs, can trigger it.

Treatment is often with a combination of antipsychotic medications and various types of psychotherapies.

During a crisis, a person with schizophrenia may require hospitalisation until the symptoms subside somewhat.

The study was published in the journal European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience (Raugh & Strauss, 2021).

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.

A drug that suppresses the immune system has promising effects on the symptoms of schizophrenia, new research finds.

Schizophrenia may be partly caused by a disordered immune system, the findings suggest.

In immune disorders, the immune system mistakenly attacks the body.

In the process, the brain’s function might be affected.

The drug, called methotrexate, is normally used to help treat cancer and autoimmune diseases.

However, giving it to people with schizophrenia helped reduce the so-called ‘positive’ symptoms of the mental illness.

Typical positive symptoms of schizophrenia include hallucinations, repetitive movements and delusions.

They are called positive not because they are good but because they add rather than take away.

People with schizophrenia also experience ‘negative’ symptoms such as difficulty showing emotions, apathy and withdrawal from social situations.

A third group of symptoms involves problems with memory, focus and attention.

Professor Imran Chaudhry, the study’s first author, explained:

“Methotrexate is thought to help treat autoimmune disorders by resetting the way T cells—an important part of the immune system—work.

This action on the central nervous system may account for the improvement in symptoms we found in our study.”

Half of almost 100 people in the study were given 10 mg of methotrexate, while the rest were given a placebo.

Professor Chaudhry said:

“We used the lowest clinically effective dose in autoimmune disorders which often needs to be increased so higher doses could produce a more powerful effect in schizophrenia.

However, the health risks of methotrexate are substantial and require careful monitoring which is why we would rule out large unfocussed trials.”

Dr Omair Husain, study co-authors, said:

“Immune systems could be involved in schizophrenia and that raises fascinating questions.

Perhaps one day we might be able to identify subsets of people with schizophrenia who may respond to treatments that act on the immune system.”

The study was published in the Journal of Translational Psychiatry (Chaudhry et al., 2020).

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.

People with schizophrenia have lower levels of a vital protein found in the synapses, new research finds.

The finding could help explain the worst symptom of schizophrenia: the inability to plan and remember.

The synapses form connections that allow electrical and chemical signals to pass between neurons.

For the first time, advanced brain scans have shown lower levels of the protein in the synapses of living people who have schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is one of the most serious types of mental illness.

It can cause delusions, hallucinations, confused thinking and dramatic changes in behaviour.

The latest discovery could help scientists develop therapies and understand the cognitive difficulties that are central to schizophrenia.

Dr Ellis Onwordi, the study’s first author, said:

“Schizophrenia is a highly debilitating disorder, and the therapeutic options are too limited for many patients.

To develop better treatments in the future we need studies like this to shine a light on how the extraordinarily complex wiring of the human brain is altered by this disease.

Having scans that can characterise the distribution of the approximately 100 trillion synapses in the living brain, and find differences in their distribution between people with and without schizophrenia, represents a significant advance in our ability to study schizophrenia.”

The study included 18 people with schizophrenia and compared them to 18 health controls.

The neuroscientists injected a tracer that binds to a particular protein found in the synapses called SV2A (synaptic vesicle glycoprotein 2A).

SV2A is a marker of the density of synaptic nerve endings.

The results showed that people with schizophrenia had lower levels of SV2A in the frontal area of the brain.

The frontal area of the brain is central to a huge variety of vital processes including memory, language, the emotions, cognition, problem-solving and many more.

Professor Oliver Howes, study co-author, said:

“Our current treatments for schizophrenia only target one aspect of the disease—the psychotic symptoms—but the debilitating cognitive symptoms, such as loss of abilities to plan and remember, often cause much more long-term disability and there’s no treatment for them at the moment.

We need to develop new treatments for schizophrenia.

This protein SV2A could be a target for new treatments to restore synaptic function.”

Since people with schizophrenia in the study had been taking anti-psychotics, the researchers wanted to rule out the lack of synaptic protein being a side-effect.

Rats fed anti-psychotics for a month, though, showed no sign of lower levels of the protein SV2A.

Professor Howes said:

“This is reassuring as it’s suggesting that our antipsychotic treatments aren’t leading to loss of brain connections.

Next we hope to scan younger people in the very early stages to see how synaptic levels change during the development of the illness and whether these changes are established early on or develop over time.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications (Onwordi et al., 2020).