Schizophrenia is a severe mental illness that affects 1% of the population. Memory impairments, hyperactivity, auditory and visual hallucinations, and other neuropsychiatric symptoms occur due to disturbances in the rhythm of neurons. But what changes at the cellular level lead to desynchronization? Researchers from the University of Geneva not only explained the mechanism of disruption of neural networks, but "fixed" it in adult mice and suppressed the pathological behavior characteristic of schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a genetically determined disease, and many other pathologies increase the risk of developing it. For example, such diseases include Di Georg syndrome (22q11.2 syndrome), which occurs due to the loss of 30 genes from one of two copies of chromosome 22. In patients with this syndrome, schizophrenia develops 40 times more often.
Scientists strive not only to understand how pathology arises, but also how it can be eliminated already in adult patients.
Scientists from Geneva worked with neural networks of the hippocampus of mice, which had both the behavioral symptoms of schizophrenia and genetic disorders characteristic of Di Georg's syndrome.
In healthy mice, thousands of neurons in the networks work in concert and the impulses in them pass at the correct intervals. In sick mice, the efficiency of the networks remains at the same level, but the impulses inside it are absolutely scattered.
The researchers were able to harmonize the work in neural networks by acting on inhibitory neurons, including parvalbuminergic neurons. But will it be just as easy to electrostimulate these areas of the human brain? The fact is that the activity of neurons in mice is much less than the activity of the same neurons in humans, and excessive excitation can cause even greater disturbances in the functioning of neural networks.
Help even adult patients
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Next, scientists tried to harmonize the activity of parvalbumin neurons. They excited the disconnected inhibitory neurons and were able to establish the order and adequate functioning of the neural networks. In mice, behavioral abnormalities decreased, hyperactivity decreased, and memory improved. Excitation of almost inactive inhibitory neurons can restore the functioning of neural networks as a whole - even in the adult brain.
Today, schizophrenia is treated with dopaminergic and serotonergic antipsychotics. They successfully eliminate hallucinations, but have almost no effect on other symptoms, in particular, they do not improve cognitive abilities. In the future, a new treatment method may be associated with the elimination of pathology in parvalbumin-containing neurons, with an increase in their inhibitory activity, but there is still a lot of work to be done before that.
Anna Morozova
