“Symptoms are accompanied by impaired cognitive and behavioral functions”
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem announced on Monday that a decade-long research aimed at studying the genetic contribution to the onset of childhood schizophrenia (COS) has come to an end. The results of this study, in collaboration with Eitanim Psychiatric Hospitals, Jerusalem Mental Health Center, Sheba Medical Center and researchers from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Columbia University in New York, were recently published. In Schizophrenia Research.
The role of genetics in schizophrenia is widely studied in the common form of the disease which appears in adolescence or early adulthood. However, it has rarely been examined in young patients with COS, a serious and rare form of schizophrenia that appears before the age of 13. It is estimated that there are around 200 people with COS in Israel today.
The principal investigator of this study is Professor Yoav Kohn, former Chairman of the Department of Psychiatry at the Hebrew University of Hadassah School of Medicine and Director of the Child and Adolescent Psychiatry Department at Eitanim .
“Childhood schizophrenia manifests similarly to adults, including symptoms such as mistaken thoughts, hallucinations, disorganized speech and behavior, as well as decreased motivation and other symptoms. All of these symptoms are accompanied by impaired cognitive and behavioral functions,” he said.
COS poses a diagnostic challenge for mental health professionals because many children report unusual phenomena in thought and perception, which may result from the normal use of the imagination to cope with mental distress. . There is also a differential diagnosis with autism and anxiety disorders, as well as with post-traumatic disorders which can even reach states close to psychosis.
“Childhood schizophrenia has an even stronger genetic basis than later schizophrenia. There is therefore reason to believe that in this population it will be easier to identify the genetic component of the disease etiology,” explains Dr. Anna Alkelai, research associate at Columbia University’s Institute of Genomic Medicine.
According to Dr. Kohn, genetic research on schizophrenia is currently carried out on tens of thousands of patients selected by hundreds of researchers who collaborate within a large international consortium. Although clues have been found regarding the association of more than 100 genetic regions with the disease, these studies rarely find mutations in genes that can be definitively linked to the etiology of the disorder. Furthermore, the most common genetic changes in adult schizophrenia are not uncommon in healthy people. Therefore, these results are not conclusive and are not yet useful for improving the diagnosis and treatment of the disease.