Synaptic dysfunction has an important role in schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a serious disorder of the brain that affects a person's way of thinking, acting, expressing emotions, and understanding a person's reality. People with this disorder (which is considered to be the most acute and debilitating type of mental illness), often have problems in the community (workplace and school), and in establishing social relationships. Schizophrenia frightens a person and takes him out of normal behavior.

Patients with schizophrenia change their inner world and their behavior and morals in particular, which is probably due to one of the following:

• • • Social isolation
    • Having an unrealistic and vague feeling, which is sometimes accompanied by severe anxiety.
    • Decreased appetite
    • Illusions 
    • Delusions: hearing or seeing things that do not exist
    • Feeling controlled by external forces
    • Irrelevant words or speech

Dr. Adams believes that “if future researches can establish this, it means we should be capable of giving treatments that change excitatory or inhibitory function at the proper time.”

The altered mind waves in people with recognized schizophrenia occurred because of a lack of synaptic gain, or excitability. The hallucinations and other symptoms of schizophrenia were, related to loss of neural inhibition. This would possibly imply that the loss of excitation comes first, then the brain attempts to compensate for this by decreasing inhibition, but then further, this leads to hallucinations.

Dr. Adams added: “We want to try to reflect these findings in other datasets. In particular, we want to study different stages of the disorder and not just at people with quite long-established diagnoses. It would also be important to use animal models to analyze whether loss of synaptic gain on excitatory neurons is certainly compensated by the lack of inhibition, and how we might be able to intervene in this process.” 

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