The Relationship Of Schizophrenia And Dopamine

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The Relationship of Schizophrenia and Dopamine

Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating mental illness. Although the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, there are many hypotheses. The most widely accepted explanation is the dopamine hypothesis.
Schizophrenia is the most common and destructive kind of psychosis, which is an impairment of thinking that causes the affected person’s interpretation of reality to be severely abnormal. Schizophrenia affects 1% of the adult population including more than 2.7 million Americans. It is typically diagnosed in young adulthood and occurs equally in men and women. The disease usually consists of hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal, flattened emotions, and loss of social and personal care skills.
Schizophrenia can be characterized by disturbances in the areas of the brain that are associated with thought, perception, attention, emotion, motor behavior, and life functioning. The symptoms are divided into negative and positive categories. Negative symptoms consist of behavioral deficits such as blunting of emotions, language deficits, and lack of energy. These negative symptoms result in reduced brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. Positive symptoms are frightening as well, but they are not as disabling in the long term as negative symptoms. These positive symptoms consist of hallucinations, delusions, and bizarre behavior.
The dopamine hypothesis states that the brain of schizophrenic patients produces more dopamine than normal brains. There is a lot of clinical evidence that supports the dopamine hypothesis. The first evidence that dopamine may be involved came from amphetamine users. Amphetamines work by causing the brain to produce more dopamine and have been shown to produce psychotic-like symptoms. In addition, traditional anti-psychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine receptors in the brain. Much of the dopamine activity is found in the limbic system...