Clues to schizophrenia causes found in babies.

Cloth embroidered by someone suffering from schizophrenia - wikimedia commons

Schizophrenia is a misunderstood and difficult mental illness to treat, doctors tell us.  Many of the causes are said to be multiple, with various ideas about what brings about this illness.  But research has offered some clues.

One in 100 people worldwide have a debilitating mental illness called schizophrenia that scientists have now found may be detected when babies are only a few weeks old.

Most of the signs and symptoms of schizophrenia don't occur until an individual is an adolescent or adult, at which time it becomes difficult to treat.

Research evidence that brain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia ca be detected in babies as young as two weeks makes it a serious breakthrough for treatment of this complicated disorder.

“It allows us to start thinking about how we can identify kids at risk for schizophrenia very early and whether there things that we can do very early on to lessen the risk,” said lead study author John H. Gilmore, MD, professor of psychiatry and director of the UNC Schizophrenia Research Center.

To develop these conclusions researchers at Chapel Hill used ultrasound and MRI to look at the brain development of 26 babies that were born to mothers with schizophrenia.  Those who have a first-degree relative with the disease have a 10% statistical chance of having the disorder.  What researchers found is that the high risk baby boys had larger brains than babies of mothers with no evidence of schizophrenia.

“Could it be that enlargement is an early marker of a brain that’s going to be different?” Gilmore speculated. Larger brain size in infants is also associated with autism.

But there was no difference in brain sizes of girls with schizophrenic mothers and those without, which fits the pattern that the mental disorder is more common and more severe in males.

Researchers hope to follow up with these children and assess language and motor skills develop to determine the issues associated with the onset of schizophrenia.

“This is just the very beginning,” said Gilmore. “We’re following these children through childhood.”

This research gives the first definitive sign that certain abnormalities associated with schizophrenia can be assessed early in life.  This could help doctors provide intervention early.

“The research will give us a better sense of when brain development becomes different,” said Gilmore. “And that will help us target interventions.”

But interestingly enough, despite research that highlights the very early signs of schizophrenia, the standard answer to the question about when it develops continues to be, as it was two years before this research in 2010, as starting in the teen years.  Yet as researchers have demonstrated, there are earlier signs.  The problem is that the information is often lacking in the general population, and within families, so that diagnosis can be made early enough, it seems.

Even the National Institute of Mental Health, known as NIMH by its anacronym, continues to recite the features of schizophrenia without including knowledge of this research, although it briefly mentions childhood potential for details.  Nevertheless, it explains it is difficult to ascertain some of the hallmarks of the disease until later on in the adolescent or early adult years, at a time when the characteristics of the illness become more pronounced than at earlier stages.

Nevertheless, having the information that there are clues in babies can help families and physicians look for patterns in the developmental years, and thereby find ways to intervene early.