Andrei Y Arkhipov
Institute of Higher Nervous Activity, Russia
We elaborated the hypothesis of pathogenesis of paranoid schizophrenia with positive symptoms (pseudohallucinations etc.). The obtained data have revealed that the positive syndrome in paranoid schizophrenia corresponds to the disturbances of balance of brain excitation/inhibition processes and expression of protein reelin, are caused by infringement of gene's RELN methylation, resulting to dysfunction of neural networks. In the first part of our experimental work, we studied different ERP components to visually present emotionally negative and neutral stimuli. The most surprising results appeared to be simultaneous increase (decrease) of both ERP components parametersâ??latencies and amplitudes only in patients. The results found in our schizophrenic patients, we called â??paradox effectâ? evidently pointing to the disturbance of the balance between the processes of excitement and inhibition. The fMRI study was aimed to detect brain areas where connectivity is disturbed. We think this can be temporal and frontal (prefrontal) areas as is known that in schizophrenic patients the function of planum temporale, sensory input for auditory stimuli is damaged and frontal areas are greatly deficient. The third part of our work was the study of the gene RELN responsible for microstructural brain anomalies during ontogenesis contributing to the development of schizophrenia. Reelin (protein of gene RELN) contributes to expression of GABA and release of glutamate on NMDA-receptors; its deficit provokes the disturbance of excitation/inhibition balance and could be used as biological marker. Thus, our complex study was done to obtain biological markers paranoid syndrome in schizophrenia.
Email: arhip76@bk.ru
