What are the most common causes of schizophrenia?
A lot of effort has gone into trying to understand what most commonly causes schizophrenia. People have started to look at genetics. There's been a lot of work looking at the structure of the brain and how the cells are organized in efforts to understand the most common causes of schizophrenia. People have also started to look at how environmental factors may be important in the development of schizophrenia. This includes some ideas that a viral infection during certain parts of the pregnancy may predispose a newborn to developing schizophrenia. We know there are a couple neurotransmitter systems that are very relevant in schizophrenia. This includes dopamine which is important in regulating motor activity as well as some of the cognitive processes in the frontal lobe, and also glutamate, which is another neurotransmitter system that is also the focus of a lot of research today. Another focus has been to look at the actual structure of the brain. We know that in schizophrenia we have changes in volume of certain regions of the brain. We also know that if you look very carefully at the structure of the neurons in certain areas of the brain you can see that that the structure is disorganized compared to what it should look like.
