Epigenetics and Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a group of serious mental disease with unknown causes, mostly occurring in young adults. According to the epidemiological data, about 1% people will suffer from schizophrenia in life. The clinical manifestations involves the disorders of perception, thinking, emotion, behavior and other aspects as well as incompatible mental activities. Patients usually have clear consciousness and normal intelligence, but some patients have the damage of cognitive function in the course of the disease.

According to the previous behavioral and biological data, stress worsens the symptoms of Schizophrenia and the diathesis will results in a heightened response to stressors by the augmenting effect of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (Hpa) axis on dopamine (DA) synthesis and receptors. Also, DA receptor abnormality and hippocampal damage render the patient hypersensitive to stress.

Additional mechanism study indicates that a factorial combination of genetic and neurodevelopmental effects sensitize the DA system in early life. Subsequently, the disordered sensitivity results in the disorder of stress response that is further amplified by misattributed salience and paranoia, and eventual schizophrenia.

Thus, gene and environment interactions, as well as epigenetic mechanisms may play a important role in mediating the stress response during Schizophrenia genesis and development.

Genetic factor is one of the important causes for schizophrenia, for example, adolescents with one or both of whose parents have a diagnosis of schizophrenia has the high risk for schizophrenia. At the same time, the epigenetic mechanism is also thought to help understand that certain individuals at genetic risk eventually convert to schizophrenia but others with similar genetic vulnerability do not.

Among these epigenetic mechanisms, DNA methylation is the most stable and the best studied within psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia, besides, miRNAs also serve as master regulators of developmental gene-expression patterns, and are responsive to stress play an etiologic role in Schizophrenia. Previous study indicates that glucocorticoids (GC) such as cortisol induce epigenetic, DNA methylation changes in HPA axis genes, accompanied by behavioral adaptations. Emerging evidence suggests that brain endophenotypes and psychiatric outcomes can be predicted by peripheral DNA methylation measurements. In addition, DNA methylation levels are also found to vary depending on local or distal DNA sequence variation, so-called "methQTLs" (methylation quantitative trait loci). Beside stress-relevant genes, genes in other pathways, such as dopaminergic, serotonergic, glutamatergic may also play the critical roles.

Therefore, better understanding the epigenetic mechanism may provide the potential targets for early identification, intervention, and treatment in adolescents at-risk for schizophrenia.

Numerologist Warda is hooked on OG-L002 fishing, collecting. And lastly her encouragement comes from socializing along with her companions.