Schizophrenia articles

Schizophrenia is a unique disorder where there are many possible ways of looking at the pathology and circuitry of it.  Both articles had unique ways of examining the aspects of schizophrenia. I enjoyed Moore et al.’s approach to examining schizophrenia at a developmental point, since changes in the brain could occur before birth, even though schizophrenia can be diagnosed after puberty. I would definitely be interested in reading more about these models that can be used for early detection of behavioral abnormalities.  I also thought that adding the analysis of ataxia was interesting to use for behavioral testing. It would be cool to look at ataxia models by observing cerebellar circuits in schizophrenia patients.

Kellendonk et al.  take an approach step by step observing the overexpression of D2 receptors in the striatum, which was a lot for me to understand. However, each experiment only helped me validate the use of D2 receptors, even though there was not a lot of significance in the experiments performed. These models were sufficient with getting the idea that D2 overexpression does not affect cognitive deficits as much and that even D1 receptors in the PFC are an important factor in working memory. Perhaps looking at research with just D1 receptors could help validate more things. However, as the authors mentioned in this paper, rodent model tend to cause some limitations when they are being examined. Looking at a clinical view, it’s easier to examine other positive symptoms, like hallucinations and delusions, in human models. It would be interesting to examine research done for bipolar disorder, since both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder to exhibit some similar circuitry with GABA neurons.