Schizophrenia- only a thought disorder? By Aleksandra Tracichleb
- cellfiemagazine
- May 22, 2021
- 4 min read
Hi to all of our seasoned readers and hello to anyone new to Cellfie! How are you all? We know we have readers all over the world but we hope those of you in the UK have enjoyed slight loosening of Covid-19 restrictions. Thank you to Aleksandra for an insightful article on an often misunderstood topic, schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is one of the most severe psychiatric disorders that can be described as a thought disorder with other impairments as inappropriate emotions or inappropriate attribution of things. Approximately 1%-2% of a society suffers from this disease without gender or socio-economic status difference. It’s important to realise that schizophrenia is not only one disease, but it consists of a large number of subtypes such as paranoid schizophrenia or catatonic schizophrenia, which have different symptoms with various intensity.
Scientists are not entirely sure what the actual cause of the disease is but the most likely one is the dopamine hypothesis. It says that the excess of dopamine in the brain, especially in the frontal cortex, causes positive symptoms of the disease such as hallucinations, delusions, and paranoia. There is a bunch of evidence for this hypothesis such as the elevated dopamine breakdown products in bloodstream, urine and cerebral-spinal fluid in schizophrenics. What’s more, post-mortem sections revealed that there are more dopamine receptors in the frontal cortex in people with schizophrenia.
Almost all of the drugs that work with schizophrenia block dopamine receptors; it is also proved that drugs that activate dopamine receptors cause the symptoms to get worse.
There are also other neurotransmitters that might be involved in causing the disease such as serotonin, which has a structure almost identical to some psychoactive drugs such as LSD that cause hallucinations. Some studies have shown that there are abnormalities with the correct distribution of serotonin in the brain of schizophrenics.
Schizophrenia is said to be a highly genetic disorder as it has 50% heritability and therefore if one identical twin has the disease the other one has 50% chance to have it as well. Recently scientists identified more that 100 common genetic misspellings that can contribute to the disease.
There are also other factors that influence the occurrence of schizophrenia such as prenatal stress. It is proven that people who were fetuses during Dutch Hunger Winter or huge famine in China in 1959-1961 have a higher rate of schizophrenia. There were also experiments held on the rats that revealed prenatal exposure on the glucocorticoids- a popular group of medicaments- elevated dopamine levels in the frontal cortex of the offspring. There were also higher levels of schizophrenia when mothers were exposed to viruses in a 3rd trimester.
Schizophrenia is a disease of adolescent onset in which stress plays a large role. The first symptoms may be seen after a traumatic event such as a loss of a relative or a harsh break-up. The disease appears between 15-25 years of age due to the fact that it’s heavily anchored in the frontal cortex that finally reaches its maturity at the age of 25.
Schizophrenia is a disease of cognitive abnormalities: there are abnormalities in sequential thoughts that are greatly impaired. Loose associations are one of the main symptoms of this disease. They characterize with answers that are unrelated to asked questions or with sentences that don’t follow a logical sequence.
Troubles with abstraction are also seen among patients with schizophrenia, who don’t have intuition to get the right level of abstraction. They interpret everything far more concretely than everyone else. This impairment is called concreteness of thought and it’s a common symptom of schizophrenia. It can be detected by a very simple proverb test. Proverbs are normally metaphorical, therefore, if a person with schizophrenia is asked about the meaning of a particular proverb their answer is on the most concrete level.
Another common positive symptom of schizophrenia are delusions which are beliefs in impossible things such as participating in historical events or speaking with people who no longer exist. Delusions might be related to paranoia and then are called delusions of persecution. They reflect a profound anxiety with inability to tell whether something is true or not. Examples of this type of delusions are the belief that the government is spying on the society or that the fruits can hear people.
One of the best known symptoms of the disease are hallucinations that for unknown reasons are mostly auditory. One hypothesis for this fact is that people are more used to unusual visual inputs than to auditory sounds that don’t make sense. What’s surprising, the sounds are not just random noises but they are rather structured voices with content. Scientists can even feature three most common voices heard in hallucinations in Western culture: in the first place is Jesus who is followed by Satan and a head of the country/state.
Social withdrawal is tightly connected to schizophrenia as well. Individuals tend to be isolated, socially disconnected with severe problems with making new friends.
Unlike in movies, aggressive individuals are rare among the schizophrenic who have really low rates of aggression towards others. However, self-injury is a huge, really common feature of schizophrenia with the genitals, breast and thighs as the most mutilated parts of the body. Schizophrenia is a disease with one of the highest rates of suicide. Every second a person with this condition attempts suicide with the higer rate of attemps among people who experience more often periods of reemissions.
Schizophrenia is thought as a life-long disease however treatment with medications and psychosocial therapy can help manage the condition. What’s more, scientists recently uncovered a new perspective for treatment of schizophrenia. It turned out that approximately 90% of schizophrenics smoke cigarettes to provide a relief from symptoms. Research has shown that nicotine present in cigarettes might relax rigid nerve-cells shape and area in the brain affected by disease. It gives a big hope for physicians, researchers and patients as this discovery can lead to new, effective treatments for schizophrenia.
Bibliography:
‘Schizophrenia’- lecture by University of Stanford, Professor Robert Sapolsky
‘Brain Facts- A Primer on the Brain and Nervous System’
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