In terms of mental illness, we might have just had a major, major breakthrough.
Schizophrenia is a disturbing disease for a pretty simple reason: we don’t know why it happens, we don’t know if it’s genetic, and we don’t know when it will kick in if it does happen. And it’s tragic to watch: schizophrenia is a horrible, disabling mental illness.
Schizophrenics have many symptoms, but the common denominator is this: trouble sleeping. Doctors have dismissed this for years, until recently, when they decided to trigger schizophrenia-type symptoms in mice and check to see what their sleeping patterns were like.
In a word: shot.
It boils down to body clocks. The gene disrupted, SNAP25, alters proteins that communicate information from your body’s central clock to the other various biological clocks around your body. It’s a lot like jet lag: if these clocks get out of sync, it can mess with you in all sorts of ways, and not just mentally: shift workers going on third shift have a higher likelihood of type 2 diabetes, high cholesterol, obesity, and cardiovascular disease.
Schizophrenics, by the way, have almost exactly the same higher rates.
That said, there’s still the problem of cause: are the clocks going out of whack causing schizophrenia, or is a different cause of schizophrenia knocking the clocks out of whack? It still opens the door to new treatments, and might just help end a serious mental illness.
And this is why we love science, ladies and gentlemen.
image via www.cihr-irsc.gc.ca on Flickr