Schizophrenic Brain

Have you ever wondered what a schizophrenics brain looks like? Schizophrenia affects over one percent of the American population.  UCLA brain researchers developed a study with teenagers that developed schizophrenia.  The study is supposed to demonstrate how schizophrenia develops in the the brain. "Scientists have been perplexed about how schizophrenia progresses and where there are any physical changes in the brain.  We were stunned to see a spreading wave of tissue loss that began in a small region of the brain.  It moved across the brain like a forest fire, destroying more tissue as the disease progressed." This was reported by Paul Thompson who is an assistant professor at UCLA.

This image shows the differences of the male and female brains that have schizophrenia and brains that do not.   The brains that do not have schizophrenia are labeled NC and the ones that do are labeled SZ.

The studies showed that the 10 percent of the patients with schizophrenia that had gray matter loss in the outer regions of brain, it spread to the rest of the brain within five years.  Teenagers with more of the tissue loss experienced more hallucinations, delusions, erratic thoughts, hearing voices and depression.

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-Shelly Christiansen