Imaging the Brain as Schizophrenia Develops: Dynamic & Genetic Brain Maps.

Schizophrenia is a chronic, debilitating psychiatric disorder that affects 0.2-2% of the population worldwide. Often striking without warning in the late teens or early twenties, its symptoms include auditory and visual hallucinations, psychotic outbreaks, bizarre or disordered thinking, depression and social withdrawal. To combat the disease, new antipsychotic drugs are emerging; these atypical neuroleptics target dopamine and serotonin pathways in the brain, offering increased therapeutic efficacy with fewer side effects. Despite their moderate success in controlling some patients' symptoms, little is known about the causes of schizophrenia, and what triggers the disease. Its peculiar age of onset raises key questions: What physical changes occur in the brain as a patient develops schizophrenia? Do these deficits spread in the brain, and can they be opposed? How do they relate to psychotic symptoms? As risk for the disease is genetically transmitted, do a patient's relatives exhibit similar brain changes? Recent advances in brain imaging and genetics provide exciting insight on these questions. Neuroimaging can now chart the emergence and progression of deficits in the brain, providing an exceptionally sharp scalpel to dissect the effects of genetic risk, environmental triggers, and susceptibility genes. Visualizing the dynamics of the disease, these techniques also offer new strategies to evaluate drugs that combat the unrelenting symptoms of schizophrenia.