Researchers from Taipei Veterans General Hospital yesterday said they have discovered that the inner workings of schizophrenia lies with “brains in chaos.”
They said that when the brain is engaged in overly stimulating or extremely tedious tasks for extended periods of time, it fails to effectively process signals, causing a degeneration of cognitive functions.
A 24-year-old man who is undergoing schizophrenia treatment at the hospital had started suffering from insomnia and anxiety after he was discharged from military service, the hospital said, adding that he later started having auditory hallucinations and thoughts that he could not control, before being diagnosed with the mental disorder.
Albert Yang (楊智傑), an attending physician at the hospital’s psychiatric department, said that people with schizophrenia might suffer from delusions, auditory hallucinations, disordered thoughts and other symptoms, adding that the incidence rate of the mental disorder is about 1 percent, with most occurrences reported among people between the ages of 20 and 30.
While the causal mechanism of schizophrenia is still unclear, the researchers took notice of studies on heartbeat, which showed that when a person suffered from heart disease, the heartbeat became monotonous, indicating heart failure, or over-active and chaotic, indicating cardiac arrhythmia, Yang said.
The research team spent about three years comparing magnetic resonance imaging scans of 110 schizophrenia patients with scans from 200 healthy people, Yang said, adding that they have discovered that brain activities followed similar patterns as the heart.
When signals at the patients’ temporal lobe, which processes sensory input, become monotonous, they might suffer from delusions and auditory hallucinations; and when the prefrontal cortex becomes over-active and signals become chaotic, the brain fails to process signals effectively and cognitive function degenerates, he said.
While a healthy mind can change its thought patterns and respond accordingly to different stimuli or stresses, allowing the person to be flexible in dealing with different situations, people with a mental illness often respond with monotonous thoughts, such as negative thinking, or chaotic behavior, such as irrational actions, the researchers said.
While schizophrenia can be treated with medication and psychotherapy, in combination with psychological and social supports, there are also some principles that people can apply to their daily lives to maintain a healthy mind, the researchers said, listing the principles as: approaching and learning new things to avoid mental apathy, participating in social activities to avoid self-isolation and getting plenty of sleep to avoid unnecessary stress and fatigue.
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