20 March 2001

IDENTIFICATION OF SCHIZOPHRENIA GENE

Scientists from the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the Julius Maximilians University in Wuerzburg, in Germany, have announced the identification of a gene mutation that they say helps to cause a particularly severe form of the schizophrenia in families catatonic schizophrenia.

Commenting on the announcement, Marjorie Wallace, Chief Executive of mental health charity SANE, which founded the Prince of Wales International Research Centre, in Oxford, for research into schizophrenia said:

"Any discovery which throws light on the cause of this destructive condition is exciting but the Wuerzburg study has traced only one family, with an extremely rare form of schizophrenia, and its findings may be difficult to replicate or generalise to more common forms of the illness.

"We are all involved in this search for a common gene and there have been many false dawns. Much more research is urgently needed before we can give hope of a revolution in treatment and an eventual cure to sufferers and their families."

World expert on schizophrenia genetics, Professor Tim Crow of Oxford University, is Scientific Director of SANE's Research Centre. Professor Crow's research work includes, as well as the search for the gene, the study of the onset of schizophrenia in adolescence and the changes mental illness brings about in the brain as a clue to its genetic origin.

Professor Crow has found that people who are not strongly left or right-handed are often late in developing language and may be more likely to develop schizophrenia. His work with brain scan imagery has demonstrated the reduced level of asymmetry in the brains of people with schizophrenia.

ends