Schizophrenia is a chronic psychiatric condition that impacts a person's feelings, thinking, behavior, and interaction with the people and world around them.
Schizophrenia: a Psychotic Disorder
The disorder is a serious mental condition that can cause a person to be dissociated from reality and experience symptoms such as delusions, hallucinations, and disorganized thoughts.
According to the American Psychiatric Association, the prevalence of schizophrenia across the US population does not exceed 1%. The disorder leads to symptoms that can gravely affect a person's capacity to go on with daily activities.
Schizophrenia and the Brain
There has been a link between schizophrenia and various brain abnormalities. In fact, various studies have noted differences in the brains of individuals with and without the psychiatric condition, which shows how schizophrenia can affect the function and structure of the brain.
A study from 2018 compared the brain imaging data of roughly 4,5000 individuals with the condition to roughly 5,000 individuals without it. Findings revealed that individuals with schizophrenia had the largest differences in their temporal and frontal lobes. They were also observed to have thinner cortices.
The frontal lobe is the largest among the brain's four regions within the cerebral cortex. It handles judgment, memory, social appropriateness, and motor tasks.
On the other hand, the temporal lobe, which is also one of the four major lobes of the brain, plays a crucial role in memory, auditory stimuli, and emotions.
Another review also discovered that various brain regions, such as the thalamus (which functions as the relay center for sensory information) and frontal regions, of individuals with schizophrenia became smaller as time passed.
White matter, which is crucial for internal communication within the brain and brain region connections, has also been found to be reduced among individuals with schizophrenia. This was observed throughout the brain in comparison to those without schizophrenia.
A large 2022 study also looked into brain aging and schizophrenia. The study compared the brain imaging information of nearly 3,000 individuals with schizophrenia
to roughly 2,500 individuals without it. Researchers observed that the brains of those with schizophrenia were older by a gap of 3.5 years.
Disordered Thinking, Hallucinations, and Schizophrenia
Hallucinations are a symptom of schizophrenia. People with hallucinations can sense or experience things that are not actually present.
A study in 2021 shows that different brain regions could be responsible for such hallucinations. While these areas are spread across the brain, they generally connect through a certain network that includes the right superior temporal sulcus, which is crucial for social cognition aspects, and the cerebellum.
As for disordered thinking, which are thought patterns that are nonsensical and convoluted, a study in 2018 examined the data of 61 other studies and discovered that this symptom could be related to changes in particular brain regions, such as the parietal, temporal, and frontal lobes. The parietal lobe is another major lobe that handles sensory data associated with temperature, taste, and touch.
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