Know About Early Schizophrenia

In addition, the pattern of genetic effects was not the same for males and females. For example, in male twins, the genetic effect was the same for identical and fraternal twins, whereas in female twins, the genetic effect was greater in identical twins. In addition, in both sexes, the genetic effect was greater for the children of parents with schizophrenia than for the children of affected parents with no history of the illness.

“Twin and family studies indicate that the genetic component in schizophrenia is fairly strong, but they don’t give us information about how this genetic component is expressed,” says Kremen. “We found that symptoms of schizophrenia are expressed in very different ways in men and women, and that this difference may be due, in part, to hormones. Hormonal effects on the brain may be more prominent in women than in men and may result in different types of schizophrenia.”

According to Kremen, the findings of the study have implications for diagnosis and treatment of schizophrenia. “We found that men and women with schizophrenia had different patterns of symptoms, and that the symptoms in men tended to be more severe than those in women,” says Kremen. “If we knew that a patient was a man, that might be one clue