14 DAY TRIAL // A team of researchers with the Central Institute of Mental Health at the University of Heidelberg, in Mannheim, Germany, has determined in a new study that significant changes occur in the human brain before the onset of mental disorders such as autism and schizophrenia.
The team found that this was especially true for people who display high-risk genetic variations that boost their odds of developing one of the two disorders later on in life. The type of brain impairments they exhibit is similar to damages produced by conditions such as dyslexia.
The effects are clearly visible long before any outwards signs of autism or schizophrenia become apparent. The conclusions of this study could potentially be used to develop early intervention and prevention therapies against both disorders in the near future, the team believes.
The main culprits that increase people's chances of developing either of the two conditions are copy number variants (CNV), which are rare genetic alternations featuring many copies of particular segments of the human genome.
The presence of several CNV in the body has been linked with significantly increased risks of developing a series of dangerous psychiatric conditions in previous studies. The new work is the first to look at patients before they went on to develop autism or schizophrenia.
“In psychiatry we always have the problem that disorders are defined by symptoms that patients experience or tell us about, or that we observe,” says CMIH director and psychiatrist Andreas Meyer-Lindenberg. He was the coauthor of a new study detailing the findings, published in the December 18 issue of the top scientific journal Nature.
For this research, scientists monitored a genealogical database featuring more than 100,000 people in Iceland. Their focus was on 26 CNV believed to be tied to an increased risk of developing mental disorders. Around 1.16 percent of the test population had at least one of these CNV in the genome, Nature reports.
“It’s not as if [the variants] are just one incremental factor in your risk for psychosis and by themselves are not doing much. They actually are impacting cognition in a significant way,” comments University of California in San Diego human geneticist Jonathan Sebat, who was not a part of the research.
“Now we want to see whether we can find mutations in the genome that affect how people perform on exams in school, how people advance through the educational system, and how they do socio-economically. We are going to take this out of the realm of artificial tests into the real world,” concludes the chief executive and co-founder of Reykjavik-based biotechnology company deCODE Genetics, Kári Stefánsson.