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news.In a discovery that could suggest new treatments for schizophrenia, researchers at McLean Hospital, affiliated with Harvard University, have been able to produce cellular changes in rats' brains similar to those seen in humans with schizophrenia.
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The researchers produced the change in the mice by manipulating a precise area of the animals’ amygdala, a region of the brain critical to emotional stress and learning. According to the scientists, this is the first time a direct link has been established between findings seen in the postmortem brains of individuals with schizophrenia and electrophysiological recordings in rats’ brains after experimentally-induced simulations.
“This is a first for this field,” said Dr Francine Benes, director of McLean’s Program in Structural and Molecular Neuroscience. “The ability to predictably induce changes in the rat model makes it possible to develop new molecular strategies for the treatment of schizophrenia, ones that are based on specific changes in neural circuitry within the brain.”
This work is based on 15 years of Benes’ studies on the brains of deceased patients with schizophrenia. The studies had been able to identify discrete abnormalities in the circuitry of three brain regions in the limbic lobe, an area that is key to emotions and learning, functions that are abnormal in those with schizophrenia.