Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness whose origins still elude scientists. A recent study lifts the veil on the brain region involved in this disorder.
You will also be interested
[EN VIDÉO] What is a mental disorder? In this video, Virginie Lacombe, museographer and project manager at the Cité des Sciences et de l’Industrie, defines mental disorders. These are various pathologies, with equally varied causes.
Hallucinations, altered perception of reality, delusions or social isolation are some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, a complex psychiatric illness that affects around 600,000 people in France. Research efforts to understand it have led toidentify several genetic factors promoting its development. A recent study takes a further step forward by locating in the brain the region involved in this disorder.
A region of the brain linked to schizophrenia
A mutation in the uncomfortable encoding the SAP97 protein is the risk factor of schizophrenia known to date; this increases the risk of developing schizophrenia by 40%. The normal role of SAP97 is not described in detail. This protein is synthesized by neurons in the brain and appears to be involved in the functioning of synapses – the area of communication between two neurons or a neuron and another cell. This gray area has complicated the study of the role of SAP97 in schizophrenia.
The study published in Nature Communications, and conducted at the University of Southern California, focused on the role of SAP97 in the dentate gyrus, a brain region along theseahorsehimself pilot of Memory episodic, among other functions. Rats carrying an abnormal form of SAP97 show levels of glutamatea neurotransmitter responsible for glutaminergic transmission, very important. An observation that lifts the veil on a possible function of SAP97 – to contain glutaminergic signals in the dentate gyrus. This signaling all azimuths also has a detrimental effect. It induces disturbances in periodic memory in rats, one of the symptoms of schizophrenia. This study is the first to identify the brain region in which SAP97 is active and to link the alterations that its mutated form causes in the dentate gyrus to schizophrenia.
Interested in what you just read?