Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that usually starts between ages of 16 and 30. The symptoms vary from individual to individual, but common symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, and distorted perception. It is suspected usually in teens that have anxiety, depression, or sleep problems. However those symptoms do not always mean this teen has or will develop schizophrenia, usually only about ⅓ of these teens actually develop schizophrenia.

Researches now may have found a special “fingerprint” for the brain to determine if schizophrenia is likely before symptoms emerge. This “fingerprint” is really folds found within the brain. The method looks at MRI scans of the brain and the correlation between the amounts of folds in certain areas, reflecting the strength of connections in these areas. Researches composed an experiment to see how effective this method was at determining one’s likelihood of developing schizophrenia.

Photo Credit: Jurgitta (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Schizophrenia_brain_large.gif)

The research team collected MRI scans from a group of people in Switzerland, averaging the age of 24. The participants in this study included 79 people with suggestive symptoms of developing schizophrenia and 44 healthy control individuals. The researchers followed all of the participants for four years and found that 16 people in the high-risk group developed schizophrenia. After looking back through the brain scans, the researchers found that 80% of the time, the relationship between the folding patterns of the brain and the individuals who developed schizophrenia correlated. The individuals that developed schizophrenia brain scans seemed to have a “disorganized brain network”, meaning the folds of their cortical regions didn’t go hand in hand as much as the folds in the controls and the high-risk people who didn’t develop the illness. (The cortical regions of the brain refer to the cerebral cortex).

Although not yet perfected, this technique could be very useful in determining out of the individuals who have schizophrenia symptoms, their likelihood of actually developing this disorder.

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