Schizophrenia has clear genetic ties, new DNA study suggests

In the largest study of its kind, researchers have learnt there are over 100 genes that play a role in the development of schizophrenia - one of the most common psychiatric disorders affecting people around the world. 

A team led by Professor Michael O'Donovan from Cardiff University found more than one hundred genetic risk factors linked to schizophrenia following the biggest ever study of its kind.

The study included the genetic codes of more than 150,000 people - nearly 37,000 of them diagnosed with the disease. Researchers found 108 genetic markers for risk of getting the disease, 83 of them not previously reported. Scientists say that is only scratching the surface as there are still many more to be discovered.

"It's a genetic revelation; schizophrenia has been a mystery," said study co-author Steve McCarroll, director of genetics for the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. "Results like this give you things to work on. It takes it out of the zone of guesses about which genes are relevant."

Study leader of this latest research Prof. Michael O'Donovan, of the Cardiff University School of Medicine in the UK, told Medical News Today that identifying the causes of schizophrenia is notoriously difficult.

"There are no 'tests' that allow to select patients that are likely to be very similar in their causes, which means we examine groups of people with probably multiple forms of the disorder, and this dilutes the relationships between risk factors and outcome," he explained, adding:

"We can't easily access the brain in a direct way to obtain tissue from living people, so studying the disorder through many traditional approaches in medicine is more difficult. And because the assessment is by interview and careful observation, recruiting large numbers of people into studies is more costly than for simpler, easier-to-diagnose conditions."

About 1% of Americans have schizophrenia, a brain disorder that can lead to agitation, hearing voices and terrifying paranoia.