Great advance to treat schizophrenia: the largest genetic study establishes the origin of the disease
Researchers from the University of Granada participate in the international work that has just been published in the magazine 'Nature'
El largest genetic study to date on schizophrenia, published this Wednesday in the prestigious magazine Nature, reveals that the origin of this disease is in alterations in the development of the nervous system, something that until now was not known. This work, in which several Spanish institutions participate, including scientists from the University of Granada (UGR), opens the door to new drugs that modulate the neurotransmitter called glutamate.
Researchers from the Federico Olóriz Institute of Neurosciences of the UGR and the Biosanitary Institute of Granada (ibs Granada) Jorge Cervilla, Blanca Gutiérrez (Department of Psychiatry of the UGR), Margarita Rivera (Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology II) and Esther Molina ( Department of Nursing) have participated in this important scientific discovery.
Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric illness with a high level of heritability, around 70%, and the search for genes involved in its development remains one of the main unknowns in the field of psychiatry and neuroscience. This work, developed in the context of the International Psychiatric Genomics Consortium (Psychiatric Genomics Consortium), which brings together the main research groups worldwide in this field, explored the complete genome (GWAS) in a sample made up of more than 76.000 patients with schizophrenia and almost 250.000 healthy patients who acted as controls, being the genetic study on largest and most representative schizophrenia in history. The professor of Psychiatry at the UGR Jorge Cervilla explains that the genes associated with schizophrenia in this work encode proteins involved in neuronal functions such as cell differentiation and transmission between neurons. “We have also found rare variants of the SP4 transcription factor and the GRIN2A glutamate receptor associated with schizophrenia. Some of these findings are similar to those found in autism and other developmental disorders, pointing to abnormal neurodevelopment in the brains of people with schizophrenia. It is a definitive finding of the important implication of glutamate in this disease, with solid evidence that teaches us new therapeutic targets to treat it", says Cervilla, who points out that the study "dismantles the strictly psychological theories about schizophrenia and clearly demonstrates its genetic origin and the involvement of altered neural systems.”