For numerous individuals with schizophrenia, living with the condition involves challenges, not only related to hallucinations or delusions, but also due to subtler difficulties, such as problems focusing, remembering, or completing normal tasks. Scientists have asked themselves why these symptoms, which are associated with genetic risk factors that are present from before birth, take so long to emerge.
New research out of the University of Copenhagen may bring us one step closer to understanding the answer to that question. Schizophrenia and schizophrenia-like disorders are usually thought to be triggered by disturbances that happen in brain development in the womb and in the early years of life. In general, when brain changes of interest begin, we don’t tend to see the symptoms until adolescence or adulthood, but we see the genetic change or risk factor much earlier than that in gestation or infancy.
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