Link between Alzheimer’s and schizophrenia discovered

Scientists have found a part of the brain that is vulnerable to both Alzheimer’s disease and disorders that emerge in young people, such as schizophrenia.

Led by Medical Research Council (MRC) funded researcher Dr Gwenaëlle Douaud of Oxford University, the team found that the network of nerve cells in the brain (grey matter) associated with intellectual ability and long-term memory doesn’t develop until late adolescence or early adulthood. It is these mental abilities that become significantly impaired in, respectively, people with schizophrenia or those with Alzheimer’s.

The researchers also discovered that these parts of the brain are the last to develop and the first to show signs of neurodegeneration in healthy people.

The researchers compared the network of grey matter, identified from MRI data of healthy subjects’ brains, with the pattern of grey matter damage observed in the scans of people suffering from Alzheimer’s and from schizophrenia. As the researchers found striking similarities between the three, and could relate the network to key symptoms of both diseases, they suggest that these areas of the brain likely play a crucial role in the emergence of these two very different disorders.

Professor Hugh Perry, chairman of the MRC’s Neurosciences and Mental Health Board, which funded the work, said:

“Early doctors called schizophrenia ‘premature dementia’ but until now we had no clear evidence that the same parts of the brain might be associated with two such different diseases. This large-scale and detailed study provides an important, and previously missing, link between development, ageing and disease processes in the brain.

“It raises important issues about possible genetic and environmental factors that may occur in early life and then have lifelong consequences. The more we can find out about these very difficult disorders, the closer we will come to helping sufferers and their families.”

The study was the result of an international collaboration between the University of Oxford neuroscience imaging team, neuroscience researchers from the University of Oslo and research clinicians from the University Hospital Basel, Imperial College London and the University of Oxford’s Department of Psychiatry.  

The research has been published in the journal PNAS.