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Dopamine's Theory Of Schizophrenia

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Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which blurs the line between reality and fantasy for those who suffer from it. The name schizophrenia means “split mind” which refers to patients often becoming split from reality. Because of the name, schizophrenia is often confused with Dissociative Identity Disorder, also known as Multiple Personality Disorder. Schizophrenia affects about one in every one hundred people. It has a variety of symptoms which span from hallucinations to extremely disorganised speech and thoughts. Schizophrenia’s causes are not definitive, yet there are many observations and theories about them, such as the Dopamine Hypothesis. Schizophrenia has a range of treatments like therapy and prescribed drugs.
Schizophrenia has many …show more content…

One theory is the Dopamine Hypothesis which dates back to the 1960’s. By preforming post mortems on schizophrenia patients, researchers have found that schizophrenics have more dopamine receptors than people normally have. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter which is mostly involved in movements and thoughts but can also be linked to the pleasure and reward systems in our brains. Theories such as the Dopamine Hypothesis think that because of the excess of dopamine receptors the brain loses the capacity to sort between internal and external stimuli. This then causes the positive symptoms of schizophrenia. This theory has gone unproven due to the painful and risky procedure that it takes to access Cerebrospinal Fluid (which is found in the spinal column and in the ventricle system in the brain where it is made) is needed to monitor dopamine inside the body. It is clear that genes have something do with the cause of schizophrenia because of how the odds of contracting schizophrenia changes as the relation to a person with schizophrenia get closer. The original odds of developing if there is no relation to someone with schizophrenia are one in one hundred. These odds change to one in ten if someone has a parent or sibling with the disorder. The odds then change to fifty-fifty if the sibling is an identical twin. Through studies researchers have identified over one hundred genes that could relate to developing schizophrenia. Some of these genes as expected related to dopamine while others relate to autoimmune systems. Other factors that seem to increase the likelihood of developing schizophrenia include; being exposed to toxins, viruses or being malnourished while in the womb, having inflammation or autoimmune diseases, and taking psychoactive or psychotropic drugs (tobacco, alcohol, cannabis, ecstasy and cocaine) during teenage years or young adulthood. Because of the unknown causes

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Because of the substantial amount of evidence, the dopamine hypothesis is the best explanation for schizophrenia. Studies have shown that while not all dopamine genes show signals, the DRD2 genes have a significant number of signals (Edwards, A. C., Bacanu, S., Bigdeli, T. B., Moscati, A., & Kendler, K. S. 2016). The DRD2 genes also have low levels of methylation which are trait biomarkers in schizophrenia patients (Yoshino, Y et al. 2016). Patients with schizophrenia who also have depressive symptoms have problems with their dopamine genes and there is also a connection between the reward system to the depressive symptoms (Peitl, V., Štefanović, M., & Karlović, D. 2017; Walter, H., Kammerer, H., Frasch, K., Spitzer, M., & Abler, B. 2009). In addition to these pieces of evidence, elevated dopamine levels are associated with the striatum which would prove that in patients with schizophrenia dopamine is a main cause biologically (Kegeles, L. S. et al. 2010).

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