Causes Of Schizophrenia

Schizophrenia is a category of mental illness of the psychotic disorders. Psychosis refers to specific abnormalities of cognition that include delusions and hallucinations. The abnormalities of Schizophrenia are often divided into 3 categories. The first being cognitive which deals with abnormalities of attention and planning abilities. The second category of abnormalities of Schizophrenia is often called negative symptoms which can include blunted emotions and a loss of enjoyment. The third category is often called positive symptoms and this is what we refer to with the term psychosis because it can include things such as hallucinations or delusions. These are complex syndromes that span from different mental functions from the more thinking
As of now, the understanding of Schizophrenia and how it comes to be is very limited. What we know are things that may play some role in how the brain develops and how that leads to schizophrenia. In research, it has been seen for there to be quite the difference in brain appearance from people with and without schizophrenia. Some brain abnormalities of patients with schizophrenia can be seen even without a microscope. Just looking at the brain with the naked eye, you can see a difference. One difference is in the fluid filled structures inside the brain. In many patients with schizophrenia, those fluid filled structures tend to be larger than somebody who does not have the disorder. What people think this represents is that the actual amount
Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter in the nervous system that communicates a lot of information between neurons and parts of the brain. The networks of neurons that use dopamine appear to influence activity in different areas of the brain so that abnormalities can cause abnormal activities in certain parts of the brain. Importantly for schizophrenia, dopamine appears to play a big role in the activity in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain. The regions that play essential roles in the cognitive, perceptual, and emotional functions that are often abnormal in schizophrenia. Supporting the idea that abnormalities of dopamine may be playing a role in schizophrenia, is the fact that a number of medications that effect dopamine transmission often improve many of the symptoms of schizophrenia. One pathway in particular has attracted a lot of attention and is most likely playing a role in schizophrenia. There are a collection of neurons right around the brain stem that use dopamine as their neurotransmitter so that their cell bodies are located in the ventral tegmental area. The cell body’s axons project to a number of areas throughout the brain to release that dopamine onto other neurons in many areas of the brain. This pathway is the mesocorticolimbic pathway. This pathway refers to where the neurons are starting, which is the mid brain