Schizophrenia Research: Biology Genetics Environment

Schizophrenia Research Paper
Student’s Name
Institutional Affiliation
Schizophrenia Research Paper
Schizophrenia is a condition whose clinical signs, symptoms, causes and cognitive characteristics have been described. There are pharmacological treatments for this condition though they are likely to be palliative. However, the available literature and knowledge about this condition has not explained its pathophysiology or etiology. Scientists have discovered that the risk factors for the illness are genetic and they anticipate that the contributions from the new genetic information in the human genome will help in progressing towards discovering the mechanism of the condition. There are current efforts such as brain-imaging that are aimed at helping to understand the problem well. The brain-imaging techniques have opened up the schizophremic brain for direct inquiries, in terms of structure, neurochemistry, and function.
Definition
Schizophrenia is a psychotic illness that starts at young adults and can last for a life time. The prodromal symptoms precede the acute psychosis involving cognitive and negative symptoms. However, it is still unknown to whether the condition presents a single illness or a syndromal diagnosis thus the need for enough literature that well help to define disease subgroups. Since the disease has been around enough, clinicians have enough knowledge on the characteristics, intervention programs and response to people who have started to develop the characteristics of the disease (Myers, 1998).
Symptoms
The disease changes how one thinks, feels, and acts. Therefore, its symptoms vary in the patients who have suffered from the disease. The symptoms are seasonal (they come and go) and no one will have all of them at the same time or all through. Generally, the symptoms are classified into three kinds:
* Positive Symptoms
* Negative Symptoms
* Cognitive Symptoms
These symptoms usually begin in young adults of between 16-30 years old. Men tend to get them earlier than women.
When the condition is at its peak and symptoms are severe, the patients are not able to tell which is real and which is not though it happens less often as they are getting old. Those who have suffered from this condition are not aware that they are suffering from it until a doctor tells them. Also they are not able to realize that something odd is happening to them. Those who are able to notice this chokes it up and associate the symptoms with stress or tiredness (Berger, 2015).
* Positive Symptoms.
These changes to the patients are "add-ons" to their normal behavior. They start thinking or doing things they never did or thought of before. They include:
Hallucinations: These are virtual voices (hearing voices that are not there). The patients will start hearing seeing, smelling or hearing things that other people are not. Most often they will hear voices in their heads. These voices might tell what they are supposed to do, give them warnings of any danger, or say mean things. They voices might be talking to each other or talk directly to them.
Delusions: These are beliefs which are not true. These beliefs are strange to the patients are they are easy to be proven wrong. The affected people may think that somebody is trying to hurt them, control their brains through some activities or the police are after them. Also, they may belief that they are someone else like the president or someone who is famous or they have certain superpowers (Kumar, Rao, Raveendranathan, Venkatasubramanian, Varambally, &Gangadhar, 2015).
Confused thoughts and speech: affected people may have difficulties in organizing their thoughts. Also they might not be able to follow keenly when somebody is talking to them. They appear that they have been distracted. When talking, they may fumble with words and what they say may lack sense. They may also have difficulties in concentrating (example is they may lose track of what is going on in a TV program or show which they are watching).
Different movements: The affected people may seem to be jumpy. Sometimes they may make the same movements over and over, but may be perfectly still for hours. This is referred to as ‘being catatonic’. Many belief that those who have suffered from this condition are violent but this is not the case.
* Negative Symptoms
Affected people show changes in their emotions and feelings. They lose interest in doing what they used to do. These symptoms are easily spotted in adults and difficult in teenagers since it is normal for them to have emotional swings between high low. Depression has the same symptoms as Schizophrenia. They include:
Emotionless: Affected people tend to be like they have terrible cases of blahs. They talk less or they may not show any feelings. Sometimes when they talk their voice may sound flat which indicates that they do not have emotions. Clinicians and scientists have called this "flat affect."
Withdrawal: Affected people may stop having plans of meeting with their friends and talking to them is like pulling a tooth. Getting an answer from them is difficult and chances are that you may not get it unless you pry it out of them.
Struggling with daily life: Affected people may stop doing the basics of daily life such as bathing or taking care of themselves.
Affected people have trouble following their schedule and may not finish what they had started. Sometimes they may not even begin to do anything constructive to their lives.
* Cognitive Symptoms
Cognition is how somebody’s brain is good at sorting things, learning and using the acquired information. The affected people may have difficulties with their memories. For instance, they may find it hard keeping track of different kinds of information at the same time such as following instructions. Besides having trouble paying attention to things, they may also have difficulties in organizing their thoughts and making decisions (Campellone, Fisher & Kring, 2016).
Causes of Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia is the most dreaded psychological disorder and the most heavily researched (Myers, 477). Despite scholars investing their time and resources researching about this dreaded disease, there is no enough evidence pointing towards a simple cause of this condition. Characteristically the illness starts in young adults of about 16 years and lasts for a lifetime with occasional recoveries. However, several factors have been found and proven to be increasing the vulnerability of this condition. These factors have been categorized to two kinds:
* Genetic factors
* Environmental factors
Scholars have agreed that the condition develops due to a result of interplay between biological factors (inherited genes) and the kind of environment one is exposed to. Most scholars converge at this point even those who are opposing it. Schizophrenia is believed to be a result of genetic inheritance and the environmental stressors during the early stages of life that leads to subtle alterations in the brain making one susceptible to develop the condition. The environment that one is exposed to later in life (early childhood or adolescence stage) can damage the brain of a person increasing the risk of developing schizophrenia. In fact scholars have said that the condition is caused by a combination of biological, psychological and social factors which they have termed as bio-pscho-social model (Bergers, 2015).
However, neither the environmental nor biological factors are a determinant that one will develop or not develop schizophrenia. The risk factors vary from among individuals while one can develop the condition due to a strong family history another may develop it due to environmental factors which they experience later in life. The exact process through which environmental factors are translated into brain changes leading to schizophrenia has being thought to result from epigenetics and research has supported this (Myers, 1998).
Research has shown that the brain of young children and teens is sensitive to stress and can get damaged to frequent stresses. Moderate stress to teens may be very severe to young children that may damage their brains. This may increase the risks for many types of mental disease in the future.
* How Genes Contribute to Schizophrenia
There is no doubt that genetic predisposition enhances the probability of schizophrenia. A child who has a biological parent that has been diagnosed with schizophrenia has approximately a one in eight chance of developing this dreaded disorder (Berger, 407). Being a twin also increases the risk, monozygotic twin’s concordance rate ranges from 30-50%, while a dizygotic twin rate decreases to about 15%. While there is a considerable drop, these rates are still considerably higher that a 1% rate which is found in the general population (McCance and Huether, 551). While the genetic contribution is unquestionable, the genetic role is not quite so straightforward. An individual may carry the genes for schizophrenia, but not necessarily manifest the illness. In 1983 behavior geneticists Susan Nicol and Irving Gottesman discovered that some people:
"Have the genetic predisposition to the disorder but that this predisposition by itself is not sufficient for the development of schizophrenia," (Myers, 479).
It is evident that having genes that are associated with the condition is the starting point of the condition. However research have shown that those individuals who have the genes but do not experience the environmental contributing factors, chances are that they may not develop the condition (Kendler, 2015). But if they are exposed to the contributing environmental factors, chances of developing the illness increases and the more the individual experiences the factors, the person will ultimately get the disease. It is supported by the idea that adopted children who carry the genes of parents who had the condition had a lower rate of developing the disease if they are brought up in a healthy family unlike in dysfunctional family. Only 6% of children raised in a healthy family may end up developing schizophrenia while more than 50% of the children in dysfunctional families are likely to develop the condition. There is a current research on how multiple genes and possibility of epigenetic interactions contribute to this illness.
* Environmental Factors
Researchers of Schizophrenia have used the te...