Washington, Oct 22 : In a collaborative study, UCLA and Dutch researchers have identified three new candidate genes for schizophrenia that may contribute to a better understanding of how the disease evolves.
For the study, Roel A. Ophoff, an assistant professor with the Center for Neurobehavioral Genetics at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, and his colleagues examined the genetic makeup of 54 Dutch patients diagnosed with deficit schizophrenia, a particularly severe form of the disease that is both chronic and debilitating.
Specifically, they looked at a number of large but rare deletions and duplications in the genome of the patients, known as copy number variants, or CNVs.