Puzzling over schizophrenia: schizophrenia as a pathway disease.

Abstract

Effective treatment for schizophrenia is still an unmet clinical need. Alleviating problems associated with cognitive impairment and finding the root of the disease remain priorities for clinicians and scientists. The incomplete understanding of the basis of this pathology has urged for research that will unravel the genetic origin of schizophrenia. But studies involving environmental exposure and social impact have also hinted at extrinsic factors as players in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, which may be exploited to prevent the development of the disease. In 'Bench to Bedside', Patrick Sullivan proposes a model putting forward how genetic variants may confer risk by functioning together within the same pathway. This disease pathway hypothesis would imply a polygenetic variation affecting the same pathway and the alteration of a transcriptional network as a root for increasing schizophrenia risk. In 'Bedside to Bench', Andreas Meyer-Linderberg and Heike Tost discuss human-based population studies that suggest that environmental factors linked to development of schizophrenia can affect brain regions involved in the human social-emotional processing network. Genetic risk variants for schizophrenia can also influence similar regions in the brain, suggesting that environmental and intrinsic factors may converge in the same neural circuit.