Prevention of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia

What is schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is one of the most complex of all mental health disorders. It is a severe, chronic, and disabling disturbance of the brain that causes distorted thinking, strange feelings, and unusual behavior and use of language and words.

What causes schizophrenia?

There is no known single cause responsible for schizophrenia. It is believed that chemical imbalance in the brain is an inherited factor which is necessary for schizophrenia to develop. However, it is likely that many factors - genetic, behavioral, and environmental- play a role in the development of this condition.

Schizophrenia is considered to be multifactorially inherited. Multifactorial inheritance means that "many factor" are involved. The factor are usually both genetic and environmental, where a combination of genes from both parents, in addition to unknown environmental factors, produce the trait or condition. Often, one gender (either males or females) is affected more frequently that the other in multifactorial traits. There appears to be a different threshold of expression, which means that one gender is more likely to show the problem, over the other gender. Slightly more males develop schizophrenia in childhood; however, by adolescence, schizophrenia affects males and females equally.

Who is affected by schizophrenia?

Schizophrenia is uncommon in children under the age of 12 and hard to identity in the early phases. A sudden onset of the psychotic symptoms of schizophrenia occurs in middle to late adolescence. Statistics indicate that schizophrenia affects approximately affected 2.4 million Americans. A child born into a family with one of more family members affected by schizophrenia has a greater chance of developing schizophrenia than a child born into a family with no history of schizophrenia.
After a person has been diagnosed with schizophrenia in a family, the change for a sibling to also be diagnosed with schizophrenia is 7...