A blood test for diagnosing schizophrenia - the most serious form of mental illness - could be available this year, according to an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News, ACS' weekly newsmagazine. The disorder, with symptoms that can include hallucinations and delusional thoughts, affects more than two million people in the United States and millions more worldwide...

A significant obstacle to progress in understanding psychiatric disorders is the difficulty in obtaining living brain tissue for study so that disease processes can be studied directly. Recent advances in basic cellular neuroscience now suggest that, for some purposes, cultured neural stem cells may be studied in order to research ...

A new technology developed by neuroscientists at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) transforms the way highly detailed anatomical images can be made of whole brains. Until now, means of obtaining such images - used in cutting-edge projects to map the mammalian brain - have been painstakingly slow and available only ...

In a new study from the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH), people with schizophrenia showed greater brain activity during tests that induce a brief, mild form of delusional thinking. This effect wasn't seen in a comparison group without schizophrenia. The study appears in the December issue of Biological ...

A report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the JAMA/Archives journals states, that in adolescents with diagnosed schizophrenia and other psychoses gray matter volume seems to decrease and cerebrospinal fluid in the frontal lobe increases compared to healthy adolescents without psychosis. According to background ...

Adolescents diagnosed with schizophrenia and other psychoses appear to show greater decreases in gray matter volume and increases in cerebrospinal fluid in the frontal lobe compared to healthy adolescents without a diagnosis of psychosis, according to a report in the January issue of Archives of General Psychiatry, one of the ...

Scientists at The Scripps Research Institute have discovered that DNA stays too tightly wound in certain brain cells of schizophrenic subjects. The findings suggest that drugs already in development for other diseases might eventually offer hope as a treatment for schizophrenia and related conditions in the elderly...

The identification of genes that contribute to a susceptibility to complex neuropsychiatric disorders such as schizophrenia, major depression and bipolar disorders has been not very successful using conventional genetic approach. There are several problems associating with this conventional approach including carriers of genes cannot be identified in the absence of ...