Schizophrenia Paradox Research Paper

Kaitlin Berger-Jones
12/6/12

Explaining the Schizophrenia Paradox

Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that manifests in a variety of ways, including disorganized thoughts, hallucinations, delusions, and social withdrawal. The schizophrenia paradox is described by the fact that there is a lower reproductive rate of those with schizophrenia (about 50% lower compared to a healthy population) than prevalent in the population. In every culture, schizophrenia is prevalent in about 1% of the population, a greater percentage than can be accounted for by mutation. Studies have indicated that schizophrenia occurs more through genetic inheritance than environmental influence. Adopted children with biological relatives with schizophrenia have
Because schizophrenia is most commonly expressed in the late teens or twenties, and more prevalent in men than in women, researchers have examined how the rate of maturation of the brain might contribute to schizophrenia. Throughout youth, neurons in the human brain are pruned to get rid of unused neural pathways and strengthen pathways that are used more often. Genes that prolong the maturation period or change the rate of maturation could result in over-pruning, which would decrease neural connectivity (Brune 2003, Polimeni 2003). This could account for why schizophrenia is more prevalent in men than in women since men have a more delayed maturation period, allowing for a longer time for pruning. If this is the case, one would predict that hallucinations that occur earlier in the onset of schizophrenia would decrease in time as more pruning occurs. This theory is compatible with cases of chronic schizophrenia in which hallucinations do in fact decrease over
Increased cerebral flexibility and variation in brain function came with the “disadvantageous byproduct” of personality disorders and psychosis. One theory proposes that new neural pathways established in the brain have been advantageous, but are randomized so that nonadaptive “misconnections” are also formed. Such trial and error would produce various results, potentially producing characteristics that could be classified as schizophrenia. However, the theory that schizophrenia is a random phenomenon fails to address the fact that schizophrenia and other mental disorders have a specific, organized array of symptoms. Diet may have been a factor in the evolution of schizophrenia. In the last two million years, some essential fatty acids have been more available which may have led to an increase in neural microconnectivity (Polemeni 2003). Such an increase could potentially result in over-excitability in some areas of the brain, which may be associated with paranoia or