Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a common serious psychotic illness that typically emerges in late adolescence and early adulthood. It is characterized by hallucinations and delusions (commonly known as positive symptoms), social withdrawal, alogia, and flat affect (negative symptoms), and cognitive disabilities. While treatments exist for the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia, there is no effective therapy to prevent the cognitive impairments. The disorder is substantially heritable, but expression of the clinical phenotype is likely to involve the interplay of multiple susceptibility variants, epigenetic factors, and environmental influences. Although it has been suggested that many of the promising candidate genes are involved in the development and maintenance of synaptic function, the most of them remains to be identified. The pathogenic mechanisms underlying schizophrenia are unknown, but observers have repeatedly noted pathological features involving excessive loss of gray matter and reduced numbers of synaptic structures on neurons. Recently, it has been found that alleles of the C4 genes are associated with schizophrenia in proportion to their tendency to promote greater expression of C4A in the brain.