FOR decades scientists have been trying to understand schizophrenia, a distressing disorder that afflicts one in a hundred people. Its destructive symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, muddled thoughts and changes in behaviour. The best drugs offer little more than the ability to target symptoms. There is presently no hope of a cure because its ultimate cause has long been a mystery to science.
Schizophrenia is known to run in families, so it has always been thought that genetics might shed light on the origins of the disease. But the genetics proved harder to unpick than anyone imagined. It is only now, 16 years after the human genome was first sequenced, that scientists have honed in on the relevant genes.
For more than five years researchers, led by a group at the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, collected more than 100,000 DNA samples from around the world. They were looking for regions of the human genome that might be harbouring variants that increased the risk of schizophrenia. What they found implicated more than a hundred genes and provided a strong pointer towards a portion of the genome associated with...Continue reading
Source: Science and technology http://ift.tt/1PEMG0G
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