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Schizophrenia linked to pre-natal infection, pubertal stress
Saturday March 02, 2013 06:33:57 PM,
IANS
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Zurich: According to a
Swiss study, infection in the pregnant mother and stress during
puberty could lie at the root of schizophrenia.
The interplay between an infection during pregnancy and stress in
puberty plays a key role in the development of schizophrenia,
behaviourists from ETH Zurich demonstrated in a mouse model.
Around one percent of the population suffers from schizophrenia, a
serious mental disorder that usually does not develop until
adulthood and is incurable. Psychiatrists and neuroscientsists
have long suspected that adverse environmental factors play an
important role in causing schizophrenia.
Prenatal infections such as toxoplasmosis or influenza,
psychological stress or family history have all come into question
as risk factors. Until now, researchers were unable to identify
the interplay of the individual factors linked to this serious
mental disease.
A research group headed by Urs Meyer, a senior scientist at the
Laboratory of Physiology and Behaviour at ETH Zurich, has now made
a breakthrough: for the first time, they were able to find clear
evidence that the combination of two environmental factors
contributed significantly to the development of
schizophrenia-relevant brain changes, according to a report in
Science Daily.
The researchers developed a special mouse model, with which they
were able to simulate the processes in humans, virtually in
fast-forward mode.
"Only one of the factors -- namely an infection or stress -- is
not enough to develop schizophrenia," underscores Meyer.
The infection during pregnancy lays the foundation for stress to
"take hold" in puberty. The mother's infection activates certain
immune cells of the central nervous system in the brain of the
foetus, microglial cells, which produce cytotoxins that alter
brain development of the unborn child.
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