Abstract
Historical pursuits of the language pathway hypothesis of schizophrenia
Highlights
This is not at all a new concept that complex human language, schizophrenia, and the genetics of both are somehow connected
While on the one hand many people with schizophrenia may have inherited a large portion of common modest risk genes[18], others may come from families where inheritance is stronger and clusters in several individuals with rare unique variants contributing to illness
It will be difficult to implicate particular genes for human language, as it is likely that human language was made possible by many genes coming together to be activated in a precisely controlled, timed and coordinated process longitudinally, from the early perinatal years through age 2 when words begin to form in sentences
Summary
With regard to the genetic nature of these changes, while variations in genes that influence the development of language pathways have been long hypothesized to be underlying the genetic basis for schizophrenia, there is no current evidence that suggests that the genes selected by Du et al confer elevated risk for schizophrenia (Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium[20]; https://www.med.unc.edu/ pgc/pgc-workgroups/schizophrenia/), even in any of the rare variants that have been shown in families[21,22,23] This specific analysis in the paper published by Du and colleagues needs to be read with caution and awaits replication. Is schizophrenia the price that Homo sapiens pays for language? Schizophrenia Res. 28, 127–141 (1997)
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