by Duncan Murray
SYDNEY, July 24 (Xinhua) -- The brain connections which make human beings different and unique could be what is causing some people to develop schizophrenia, according to a paper released on Tuesday by Australian scientists.
"When we look at schizophrenia, there's been a search for decades to find underlying pathways, and it's remained a bit of a mystery," one of the papers authors and senior scientist at QIMR Berghofer Medical Research Institute, Prof. Michael Breakspear told Xinhua.
Now, researchers from QIMR, the University of Melbourne and Florey Institute of Neuroscience and Mental Health, believe they have uncovered what it is in the brain's function which leads to schizophrenia.
"Human populations require diversity, genetic and phenotypic, to respond to similar situations in different ways," Breakspear said, "as you pass through fetal development and then early childhood, your brain forms all these complex connections which give rise to your personality."
"In a lot of those connections that process is under genetic control and some of it is also influenced by what's going on in the environment and that gives you your human fingerprint, that's who you are, and it continues to slowly change."
According to the article, schizophrenia is an accumulation, in any direction, of too much genetic diversity and the impact that has on the brain.
"It doesn't really matter what direction you go from perfectly healthy human being, you head outwards in any direction, so you can become more extroverted, you can go in another direction and become more introverted, you can get more anxious, schizophrenia is just accumulating too much of this diversity."
The team arrived at this conclusion by taking data from the brains of 75 healthy young Australians and applying mathematical techniques of randomization which they compared to data from patients with schizophrenia, with the results being remarkably similar.
While their findings may not lead to new cures for the disease, Breakspear believes it could assist in early diagnosis using brain imaging technology, as well as being an important insight generally.
"What it mainly does is telling us why we have schizophrenia; it's nothing other than too much genetic diversity which impacts on brain development," Breakspear said.
"It's an unfortunate byproduct of having a diverse human population."
