A paper published in the journal Peer J. yesterday shows that schizophrenia in a person can be detected by looking in the colonies of bacteria living in the throat of the person. Scientists have been long making efforts in vain to establish a link between schizophrenia and the immune system.

Schizophrenic patients appear to have weaker immune system, but researchers have so far not been able to unravel the mystery behind the connection of the two. However, researchers have recently talked about the possibility of detecting the risk of the disease by looking into the microbiome—the colonies of bacteria that live in and around our bodies.

These bacteria play an important role in all sorts of functions, including regulating our moods and modulating our immune systems.

A team of researchers from George Washington University was prompted to investigate the types of bacteria that make up the microbiome in patients with and without schizophrenia.

For the study, they took throat swabs of 32 patients and went ahead with sequencing of the bacteria they found there. Their stint was aimed at figuring out which types of bacteria they were and their concentrations. Half the patients in the study were schizophrenic and the remaining ones were not.

The researchers observed that the types of bacteria living in the throats of schizophrenic patients were very different from those in the control patients. Concentrations of commonly found bacteria were different for control patients. Also, the diversity of bacterial species was much greater. There were more lactic acid bacteria for schizophrenic patients, a factor that could indicate balance in their microbiomes.