Causes of Schizophrenia in Children

Research has not yet given any clear evidence behind the cause or causes of schizophrenia. Some evidences indicate that schizophrenia is a neurological disorder caused by

• A genetically derived disease

• Any injury occurred during brain development prior to the birth of the child

• Traumatic life events

Genetics playing a role in diseases have been known from long. The probability of occurrence of schizophrenia increases by 1% in persons who has no family history to 10% in persons with a first-degree relative. And the risk increases to 50% in case of an identical twin. Prenatal brain injury may include

• Starvation

• Viral infections like maternal influenza

• Low or no oxygen at the time of birth and

• Untreated blood type incompatibility

Research has determined that the schizophrenia affected children possess the same abnormalities in the brain regarding structural, neuropsychological and physiological features which are found in schizophrenic adults. But the child cases of schizophrenia are severe compared to adults with more prominent neurological abnormalities. Hence this makes childhood schizophrenia to be worse and a potential disease to be researched better to completely understand it.

A clear example is that children who get schizophrenia before puberty clearly indicate abnormal brain development progressively as they grow as compared to adult schizophrenia. MRI scans of adolescents affected with schizophrenia shows fluid-filled cavities in their mid-brain, also called ventricles, to be enlarged unusually, especially between the ages of 14-18 in those with early-onset schizophrenia, thus proposing that the brain tissue volume has shrunk more than normal circumstances.

Such children seem to lose four times larger neurons and its extensions and gray matter, present in the frontal lobes than the normal teen loses. Such a loss swallows up the brain progressively starting from the back to the front in just 5 years. It initially starts in the rear areas, responsible for perception and attention, and extends in due course to the frontal areas involved in organizing, planning and executing functions which are damaged in schizophrenia.

Loss in rear areas depends on many environmental factors. Research indicates that there has been a non-genetic factor contribution for the onset and progression of schizophrenia. The loss pattern finally resembles that of adult schizophrenia. Scientists believe that the adult schizophrenia may also have had similar changes in their teenage that were unnoticed due to the lack of symptoms at that age.

Besides structural studies of brain abnormalities, research is being conducted on a set of measures that are assumed to have some connection with genetic risk of schizophrenia. Research on the early onset cases has proved that there is a link between some genetically complex disorders like Alzheimer’s disease, breast cancer and Crohn’s disease. There are clear evidences for the rate of genetically complex diseases to increase twice as much in children as compared to adults.