Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disease whose acute stage always involves a psychotic episode. The name \u201cschizophrenia\u201d means \u201cto split the mind\u201d—a term which vividly captures the idea of a complete rupture between reality and psychotic thinking. Schizophrenia is defined as a common neurobiological disease affecting about 1% of the world\u2019s population, which is roughly 20 million people. The general public tends to confuse schizophrenia with \u201csplit personality\u201d or demonizes schizophrenia as psychopathic behavior.<\/p>\n
Schizophrenia is linked to a genetic predisposition or vulnerability, as is true of any other medical disease.\u00a0 The actual cause is still unknown.\u00a0 Scientists around the world are performing genetic studies and investigating possible causes.<\/p>\n
The disease usually occurs in a person\u2019s late teens or early twenties.\u00a0 During this period, the final \u201cpruning\u201d of neurons, which are brain cells, is completed.\u00a0 Influenza viruses that occur in the mother during the middle trimester are under scrutiny.\u00a0 During the 4th<\/sup>, 5th<\/sup> and 6th<\/sup> months of gestation, fetuses undergo a complicated series of developmental processes in their brains, in which neurons hopefully migrate to their correct place, and then others are \u201cpruned\u201d correctly like the branches of a tree.<\/p>\n Scientists are searching for a correlation between these early prenatal infections as environmental insults that years later might impact the final pruning processes of the brain, at maturity.\u00a0 Difficult births, latent or dormant viruses, retroviruses, exposure to chemicals and any manner of environmental insult are all being investigated by teams of scientists around the world.<\/p>\n Because schizophrenia is such a common and debilitating disease, it can\u2019t be ignored.\u00a0 I honestly believe that we\u2019ll know a lot more about the disease in the next ten years, thanks to a cooperative worldwide scientific community.\u00a0 Perhaps they\u2019ll find more than one cause, and subsequently provide reliable and custom treatments.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" What exactly is schizophrenia and what are the causes? Schizophrenia is a devastating brain disease whose acute stage always involves a psychotic episode. The name \u201cschizophrenia\u201d means \u201cto split the mind\u201d—a term which vividly captures the idea of a complete rupture between reality and psychotic thinking. Schizophrenia is defined as a common neurobiological disease affecting … Continue reading What is Schizophrenia?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-30","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31,"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/pages\/30\/revisions\/31"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.susiedunham.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}