| Schizophrenia discovery
Author: By Steve Dow Australian brain specialists are a step closer to understanding the causes of schizophrenia, with the discovery of a brian dysfunction in afflicted patients. In research soon to be published in the journal Clinical Neurophysiology, the University of Sydney scientists studied and compared the age-matched brains of 38 healthy patients and 38 patients with schizophrenia. They asked the subjects to perform simple tasks requiring attention, measuring their levels of gamma activity. Gamma is the name given to the cycling of electrical brain activity, which occurs across different regions of the brain at about the rate of 40 times a second. Previous evidence suggests that coherent thinking is only possible when gamma cycling synchronises across the brain. Gamma thus may orchestrate our thought processes. Dr Evian Gordon and PhD student Albert Haig found that schizophrenics have reduced gamma activity and a loss of synchrony in these gamma cycles. Dr Lea Williams, a senior lecturer with the university's BRAINnet, said the centre's scientists were the first in the world to develop a method to examine gamma across the whole brain. It is also the first time the study of gamma has been applied to schizophrenia, and therefore the first time abnormal gamma activity has been found in the schizophrenic brain, she said. Gamma dysfunction may play a key role in the symptoms that define schizophrenia, Dr Williams said. These include delusions and social withdrawal. "With an understanding of gamma, we may be able to answer the question: how does the brain pull the trick off?" she said. "By trick, we mean the almost miraculous ability (that) brains have to bring together in an instant the multitude of the thoughts, experiences and sensations that occur simultaneously." The gamma study might help scientists understand, for example, how we produce a sequential pattern of meaningful speech to answer someone's questions, Dr Williams said. First, however, scientists need to explain the role of gamma in the normal brain in order to demonstrate the processes that are being disrupted in the diagnosis, treatment and early detection of schizophrenia. |