Childhood illness and schizophrenia

According to the Journal of Psychiatry Research a study of the birth and hospital records of more than 40,000 young adults in Western Australia, GUT and chest infections in early childhood appear to raise the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life, even if they do not spread to the brain.

Boys who were admitted to hospital at least twice before age three with respiratory or intestinal infections were 80% more likely than others to develop the schizophrenia by the time they were in their mid-to-late 20s.

Previous research has shown an linkage between brain infections, such as meningitis, and schizophrenia, but this study is the first to demonstrate a link with illnesses that rarely involve the central nervous system - suggesting widespread inflammation, and the body's response to it, may be sufficient to disrupt brain development.

In a separate study published last month, Cambridge University scientists wrote that particular infections during pregnancy, such as rubella, were linked to higher schizophrenia risk in offspring. It was possible, they concluded, that some viruses, or viral strains, might similarly have a disproportionate effect on brain development during early childhood.

Gluten sensitivity and psychiatric disorders

According to scientists at Karolinska Institutet in Sweden and Johns Hopkins Children’s Center in Baltimore, children born to mothers who have a gluten sensitivity may be at greater risk for developing certain psychiatric disorders later in life.

The researchers explain how their study  “is an illustrative example suggesting that a dietary sensitivity before birth could be a catalyst in the development of schizophrenia or a similar condition 25 years later.”

This may be the first study that shows how a mother’s food sensitivity may potentially lead to the development of the disorder.

The study involved the examination of 764 birth records and neonatal blood samples of Swedes born between 1975 and 1985. About 211 of them eventually developed non-affective psychoses, such as schizophrenia and delusional disorders.

Babies whose mothers had abnormally high levels of antibodies to the wheat protein gluten had almost double the risk of developing schizophrenia later in life, compared to children with normal levels of gluten antibodies.

Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging to examine structural brain aberrations

Jack Dikian

August 2011

Flipping through a pile of brain scans, a neurologist or psychiatrist would be hard pressed to pick out the one that belonged to a schizophrenic. Although schizophrenics suffer from profound mental problems -- hallucinated conversations and imagined conspiracies are the best known -- their brains look more or less normal.

Whilst earlier Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) hint of slight brain structure anomalies, it is nevertheless difficult to explain how these lead to the symptoms observed in schizophrenia and other psychiatric disorders.

A variation of MRI called Diffusion Tensor Imaging (DTI) is now allowing neurologists to study the connections between different brain areas, and seeing minute structural aberrations.

Using Diffusion Tensor Imaging (see image), for example, memory and cognitive problems associated with schizophrenia are (in some cases) seen to be linked to flaws in nerve fibers near the hippocampus, a brain area crucial for learning and memory. If such diseases are rooted in subtle "wiring" problems involving axons, DTI can be used to look at complex network of nerve fibers connecting different brain areas.

DTI tracks the movement of water molecules in the brain. In most brain tissue, water molecules diffuse in all different directions. But they tend to diffuse along the length of axons, whose coating of white, fatty myelin holds them in. Pictures can be created of axons by analyzing the direction of water diffusion.

Neuroscientists are using DTI to study a host of disorders, including addiction, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, and various neurodegenerative diseases. For instance, DTI studies have shown that chronic alcoholism degrades the white-matter connections in the brain, which may explain the cognitive problems seen in heavy drinkers.