TCD researchers taking part in a major international study have helped identify over 100 locations in the human genome associated with the risk of developing schizophrenia.

This new genetic information is expected to lead to new approaches to treating the condition, which is estimated to affect around one in 100 of the Irish population.

The findings shed new light on biological mechanisms and pathways that may contribute to the development of schizophrenia.

According to the researchers, this could lead to new approaches to treating the disorder, which has seen few new drug treatment developments in more than 60 years.

Schizophrenia is a serious psychiatric condition characterised by hallucinations, delusions, and impaired social function. It often emerges in a person's teens and early 20s.

In the genome-wide association study (GWAS) the researchers looked at over 80,000 genetic samples from schizophrenia patients and healthy volunteers, including over 3,500 Irish participants, and found 108 specific locations in the human genome associated with the risk for schizophrenia.

Eighty-three of those locations had not previously been linked to schizophrenia.
 
"This study is transformative, in showing that we can systematically identify many genetic risk factors for schizophrenia using approaches that have been successful for other diseases,” said Aiden Corvin, Professor of Psychiatry at TCD and one of the lead authors of the study.

"Now that we have more pieces of the puzzle, we are starting to group genes into identifiable pathways so that we can explore schizophrenia at a biological level."
 
The researchers point out that drugs currently on the market treat only one of the symptoms of the disorder (psychosis), and do not address the debilitating cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia.

They say the shortage of really effective treatment options is partly due to the fact that the biological mechanisms underlying schizophrenia have to date not been understood.
 
Michael O’Donovan, deputy director of the MRC Centre for Neuropsychiatric Genetics and Genomics at Cardiff University School of Medicine said: "The wealth of new findings have the potential to kick-start the development of new treatments in schizophrenia, a process which has stalled for the last 60 years.”

The research is published in the journal Nature.

Find out more about schizophrenia here

Support group for people with schizophrenia here