Schizophrenia is a mental illness that only affects about a small portion of the population. A similar name for the same disease is psychosis. This disease cause the person to lose sight with what is reality and what is fantasy. The symptoms that a person that has schizophrenia must face are delusions, paranoia, and hallucinations. The hallucinations can vary from hearing voices to seeing illusions. The causes of the illness are still obscure to scientists but there may be a physical aspect that goes along with what is going on from the inside. Signaling pathways in the body may have something to do with causing schizophrenia. The original thought about the illness is that something external like stress could be the cause but now that is definitely not the cause. A signaling pathway that is affected by the illness is the glutamate pathway. The glutamate pathway is a type of neurotransmitter in the brain. The probable cause of schizophrenia is that the pathway as actually being mutated. Uncommon mutations may have cause the pathway to be defected. The changed pathways inside the brain leaves the person with the inability to tell reality with what is not actually there. There is no exact cure for schizophrenia but there are medicines out there that keep the disease under control. Many anti psychotics drugs have been tested with schizophrenia. A couple of these drugs are clozapine and haloperidol and they were tested in the 1990s for effectiveness. The drugs when they were tested did help with schizophrenic patient with their ability to understand the world around them. The experiments that have been done reveal that the drugs do help with controlling the pathways involve with cause Schizophrenia.
Citations:
Keefe, Richard SE, et al. "The effects of atypical antipsychotic drugs on neurocognitive impairment in schizophrenia." Schizophrenia bulletin 25.2 (1999): 201-222.
Walsh, Tom, et al. "Rare structural variants disrupt multiple genes in neurodevelopmental pathways in schizophrenia." science 320.5875 (2008): 539-543.
