Researchers shed new light on schizophrenia
As part of a multinational, collaborative effort, researchers from the Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, Harvard-affiliated Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH), and scores of other institutions from all over the world have helped identify more than 100 locations in the human genome associated with the risk of developing schizophrenia in what is the largest genomic study published on any psychiatric disorder to date. The findings, which are published online in Nature, point to biological mechanisms and pathways that may underlie schizophrenia, and could lead to new approaches to treating the disorder, which has seen little innovation in drug development in more than 60 years. Schizophrenia, a debilitating psychiatric disorder that affects approximately one out of every 100 people worldwide, is characterized by hallucinations, paranoia, and a breakdown of thought processes, and often emerges in the teens and early 20s. Its lifetime impact on individuals and society is high, both in terms of...