Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

The Roots of Mental Illness

A special report just came out today from the New York Academy of Sciences - on "The Roots of Mental Illness in Children"

This is a very technical report (for scientists) but interesting to review if you want to get deep into the causes of mental illness. Some short highlights from some of the abstracts include:

"As complications of pregnancy and birth may be important risk factors for the development of schizophrenia, studying the "roots" of schizophrenia in high-risk offspring may better elucidate the interface between biology, environment, and susceptibility to illness. Using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), neurobehavioral assessments and obstetric histories, we found several significant correlations between these multiple factors"

In another paper it was found that "Premature birth can have devastating effects on brain development and long-term functional outcome. Rates of psychiatric illness and learning difficulties are high, and intelligence on average is lower than population means. Brain imaging studies of infants born prematurely have demonstrated reduced volumes of parietal and sensorimotor cortical gray matter regions."