An international team, in which ibs.GRANADA participates, establishes the origin of schizophrenia

An international team, with Spanish participation, establishes the origin of this mental illness in alterations in the development of the nervous system and describes common genetic variants with autism and other neurodevelopmental disorders

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric illness with a high level of heritability, around 70%, and the search for genes involved in its development remains one of the main unknowns in the field of psychiatry and neuroscience.

Scientists from the Granada Biosanitary Research Institute (ibs.GRANADA) and the University of Granada (UGR) have participated in the largest genetic study carried out to date on schizophrenia. The work reveals that the origin of this disease is in alterations in the development of the nervous system, something that until now was not known. The research, in which several Spanish institutions participate, opens the door to new drugs that modulate the neurotransmitter called glutamate.

The largest genetic study in history

Developed in the context of the International Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, which brings together the main research groups worldwide in this field, the work explored the complete genome (GWAS) in a sample made up of more than 76.000 patients with schizophrenia and almost 250.000 healthy patients who acted as controls. For this reason, it is the largest and most representative genetic study on schizophrenia in history.

Professor of Psychiatry, Jorge Cervilla, from the Federico Olóriz Institute of Neurosciences at the UGR and from the E05-Bioenvironmental Psychiatry research group at ibs.GRANADA, explains that the genes associated with schizophrenia encode proteins involved in neuronal functions such as cell differentiation and transmission between neurons. Together with Cervilla, the following members of her group at ibs.GRANADA have participated: Blanca Gutiérrez, from the UGR Psychiatry department, Margarita Rivera, from the Biochemistry and Molecular Biology II department, and Esther Molina, from the Nursing department.