Schizophrenia waits silently until a seemingly normal child becomes a teenager or young adult. Then it swoops down and derails a young life.

For the first time, an international group of researchers has found genetic evidence linking schizophrenia to a specific region of DNA – on chromosome 6. This is the same area where key genes for immune function are located. The LSUHSC research team was led by Nancy Buccola, APRN, PMH CNS-BC, Assistant Professor of Clinical Nursing at LSU Health Sciences Center New Orleans, who also coordinated the ten clinical sites.

A multi-national group of investigators, including a scientist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has discovered that nearly a third of the genetic basis of schizophrenia may be attributed to the cumulative actions of thousands of common genetic variants. The effects of each of these genetic changes, innocuous on its own, add up to a significant risk for developing both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Two separate studies, one in the United States and another in the United Kingdom, have discovered that a gene, labeled DISC1, plays a key role in the development of schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder that usually develops in late teens or early adulthood, between the ages of 16 and 25.

People with schizophrenia die from cancer four times as often as people in the general population. That was the conclusion of a new study published in the August 1, 2009 issue of CANCER, a peer-reviewed journal of the American Cancer Society. The study's results suggest that extra efforts should be made to improve cancer prevention and early detection in patients with schizophrenia.

When mothers become infected with influenza during their pregnancy, it may increase the risk for schizophrenia in their offspring. Influenza is a very common virus and so there has been substantial concern about this association. A new study in the June 15th issue of Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier suggests that the observed association depends upon a pre-existing vulnerability in the fetus.

A new study from the Swedish medical university Karolinska Institutet and the University of Oxford finds that the severe mental disorder schizophrenia only marginally increases the risk of committing violent crime. Rather, the overrepresentation of individuals with schizophrenia in violent crime is almost entirely attributable to concurrent substance abuse.

Significant and widespread cognitive problems appear to exist in schizophrenia in its earliest phase, making it very hard for people with schizophrenia to work, study or be social, according to a new study published by the American Psychological Association.

A study on schizophrenia treatment has implicated machinery that maintains the flow of potassium in cells and revealed a potential molecular target for new treatments. Expression of a previously unknown form of a key such potassium channel was found to be 2.5 fold higher than normal in the brain memory hub of people with the chronic mental illness and linked to a hotspot of genetic variation.

Rutgers geneticist Linda Brzustowicz and her colleagues have identified a specific DNA change that is likely to increase risk for developing schizophrenia in some people. It provides a potential mechanism that may be a point of entry for drug therapy, consistent with the growing trend of personalized medicine.

Patients with schizophrenia are able to correctly see through an illusion known as the ‘hollow mask’ illusion, probably because their brain disconnects ‘what the eyes see’ from what ‘the brain thinks it is seeing’, according to a joint UK and German study published in the journal NeuroImage.

People with schizophrenia are at increased risk for type 2 diabetes, Medical College of Georgia researchers have found.