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 Psychotic symptoms such as hallucinations, delusions, personality
changes, and disorganized thinking occur in several psychiatric
disorders, including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and psychotic
depression. Scientists understand little of what goes wrong in a
psychotic person's brain, but hope that brain imaging and systematic
characterization of genetic activity and protein composition in the
brain might help to shed light on mental diseases, eventually leading
to better diagnosis, treatment, and possibly even prevention. A new
study by Sabine Bahn and colleagues (Cambridge University) published in
the international open-access journal PLoS Medicine provides a step in
that direction.
The researchers compared the protein
composition in the cerebrospinal fluid (the clear body fluid that
surrounds the brain and the spinal cord) of 79 patients with different
psychotic disorders and 90 mentally healthy individuals who served as
controls. They found that samples from patients with psychosis had a
number of characteristic changes compared with samples from control
individuals, and that those changes were not found in the patients with
other mental illnesses. They then wanted to test whether they would see
the same pattern in a separate set of patients with psychotic illness,
which turned out to be the case. Two of the changes in the
cerebrospinal fluid associated with schizophrenia, namely higher levels
of parts of a protein called VGF and lower levels of a protein called
transthyretin, were also found in post-mortem brain samples of patients
with schizophrenia compared with samples from controls.
These
results suggest that this approach has the potential to find biomarkers
for psychosis and possibly schizophrenia, which would be helpful for
diagnosis and might help to understand the molecular basis for these
conditions. If shown, in future studies, to be directly involved in
causing the disease symptoms, they would be important targets for
rational treatment and prevention efforts.
Source:plosmedicine.org
Related Links:
Huang JTJ, Leweke M, Oxley D, Wang L, Harris N, et al.
"Disease
biomarkers in cerebrospinal fluid of patients with first-onset
psychosis".
PLoS Med 3(11): e428.
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