Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric illness characterized by the emergence of hallucinations, delusions, negativism, and disorganized behavior during adolescence and young adulthood. The disease affects an estimated 70 million patients worldwide with a lifetime risk of roughly 1 percent. With disease heritability estimated as high as 80 percent, neuropsychiatric genomics has become increasingly pursued as an area of research. However, studying schizophrenia and collecting quantifiable data proves challenging: Compared to other organ systems, the brain is relatively inaccessible for biopsy. Also, the use of human neurons in scientific research raises numerous logistical and ethical barriers, and postmortem studies risk distortion from confounding factors such as preservation quality and mechanism of death. Scientific advances allowing induction of pluripotent cells from schizophrenic patients has led to the development ...