Genetic Tests Have Potential to Subdivide Schizophrenia
Posted October 14, 2007 by Dr. T.R. Morris
Syndromes with poorly understood causes, inconsistent presentations, and ineffective treatments are the bane of practicing physicians. The main hope for these conditions is that eventually incremental scientific advances will help divide them into more predictable, preventable, identifiable, and treatable diseases. My guess is that schizophrenia (literally divided heart) is headed for functional divisions itself. Roffman and colleagues published a study in Biological Psychiatry last Spring indicating that genetic variations of the MTHFR gene influence what symptoms will predominate in schizophrenia.
Lets back up a bit. Psychologists divide the symptoms that diagnosed schizophrenics present with into positive and negative groups. Positive symptoms (not to be confused with desirable) are additions to normal experiences that people without schizophrenia diagnoses rarely experience. Examples of positive symptoms include hallucinations and delusions such as paranoia and delusions of grandeur. Negative symptoms are those that involve degrees of absence of normal experience and behavior including loss of interest, energy, warmth, humor, expressiveness, being slower to think, talk and move.
With regard to schizophrenia, the Roffman study states that having the C677T MTHFR variant increases the risk for negative symptoms in schizophrenia, while reducing severity of positive symptoms.
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