Researcher explores physiological links to schizophrenia
Gregory P. Strauss and his graduate students at Binghamton University have found surprising physiological connections to schizophrenia in their quest to better understand the mental disorder.
Schizophrenia affects about 1 percent of the world’s population and is the #1 cause of medical disability in the United States. The biggest reason for this high rate of disability is severe impairment in cognition, which makes it difficult to work or perform activities of daily living. Unfortunately, the cause of these cognitive impairments is poorly understood.
A recent paper by graduate student Lindsay Morra, which Strauss supervised, found that medical conditions such as diabetes, a high waist-to-hip ratio and especially high blood pressure were “particularly associated with a range of cognitive deficits” that occur in schizophrenia. This finding is significant because it suggests that general health problems that affect the body also affect the brain and cognition in schizophrenia. Earlier studies mostly focused on structural or neurochemical abnormalities that affect the brain broadly. The research from Strauss’ lab raised an important possibility that treating metabolic abnormalities, such as hypertension, may improve cognition in schizophrenia.
“The brain is intricately wired to receive blood from arteries,” Strauss says. “In people with schizophrenia, who often have had high blood pressure for 20 to 40 years, there is a systemic effect on the brain caused by a hardening of the arteries, which affects the brain’s ability to efficiently distribute blood throughout the brain.”
All of this is not to say that high blood pressure causes schizophrenia or vice versa. Correlation isn’t causation, as the saying goes, and Strauss emphasizes that “metabolic abnormalities only predict a small proportion of the cognitive impairment in schizophrenia.”
Another potential explanation for cognitive impairment, which Strauss is investigating with a new grant from the American Psychological Foundation, is what he calls a “motivational impairment,” or abnormal interaction of the brain’s reward system with the prefrontal cortex that can cause a certain kind of reward process to go haywire.
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