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American Morning

Breakthrough Research May Mean New Hope for People with Schizophrenia

Aired December 13, 2002 - 08:46   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.


PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Breakthrough research may mean some new hope for people with schizophrenia, autism and dementia. Our very own neurosurgeon, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, standing by to tell us how MRIs could one day predict who might become ill.
Good morning, Sanjay.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

This is actually very exciting stuff, talking about actually trying to predict disease. You mentioned schizophrenia as one of them. This is a debilitating disease. If you've ever known someone who had this mental order, you can probably tick off some of the symptoms -- we'll tick them off for you here, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations, hearing, seeing, or feeling things that are not there, delusions, disordered thinking. There is a whole list of symptoms.

But really, the sort of most terrible thing about this disease is that only one in five people will actually ever recover from this. While the disease may appear to come on suddenly, there are changes that take place in the brain long before that. That's exactly the subject of a study by a bunch of Australian researchers, who tried to figure out is there a way to predict who is actually going to become schizophrenic. They actually decided to look at using MRI scans, as you mentioned, Paula.

Actually, MRI'd 75 people who are considered high risk because of a family history or something like that, 31 percent of those people subsequently did develop schizophrenia. More importantly, what they say, and we can take a look at some of the pictures here, what they saw were some pretty remarkable and pretty predictable changes in the brain.

Paula, these images may be a little bit hard to see, so I'm just going to direct you to the second row, and look at some of images there that have red in them. That is an area where there is actually some gray matter of the brain that is starting to decrease in mass. In patients who have schizophrenia, what they're finding from this MRI study is that there is actually less gray matter in the right side of the brain and the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe.

Let me just show you my brain model here. You know I love my brain model. But on the frontal lobe, which is here, and the temporal lobe, down here, there is actually less gray matter. The significance of this, Paula, is that perhaps if you were to MRI somebody at high risk and see these changes, you could certainly diagnose early and treat early -- Paula.

ZAHN: So give us the breakdown, because you are so wedded to that brain model, of the different parts of the brain and how they are affected by schizophrenia.

GUPTA: Right. When you talk about schizophrenia, you saw the symptoms, so there are so many different parts of the brain that are sort of at play here, but again, the right frontal part of the brain and the right temporal part of the brain, I'll show you again, are responsible for some specific things. We talked specifically about attention, emotion, social behavior, judgment.

Now, if an individual has lack of volume in this part of the brain, they may be not as sort of proficient at some of those particularly traits, and some of those traits when sort of categorized together make up the symptoms of schizophrenia. The old-fashioned way is to say a certain individuals has all of these traits, delusions, hallucinations and all that, so they look like they have schizophrenia.

With these MRIs and finding these lower part of gray matter in certain parts of the brain, you could say they definitely have it. It's more of a marker.

ZAHN: And the reason why they're so important, Sanjay, you were saying 2.2 million adults every year are affected by this, and 1 percent of our population?

GUPTA: That's right. This is a very widespread disease. It usually affects people really in the prime of their lives, in their early 20s, early 30s, so people are just getting their lives going, and schizophrenia can hit.

Again, if you've ever seen somebody who has this, it can just be a very debilitating thing. But there is no cure for it, Paula, and that's sort of the second step of all this research. While we can screen for these things better, we are talking about that all of the time on your show, screening for diseases earlier, we got to learn thousand treat them. If we can treat people with schizophrenia earlier, they might have a better outcome in life.

ZAHN: All right, Sanjay.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com




Schizophrenia>


Aired December 13, 2002 - 08:46   ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: Breakthrough research may mean some new hope for people with schizophrenia, autism and dementia. Our very own neurosurgeon, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, standing by to tell us how MRIs could one day predict who might become ill.
Good morning, Sanjay.

DR. SANJAY GUPTA, CNN MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Good morning, Paula.

This is actually very exciting stuff, talking about actually trying to predict disease. You mentioned schizophrenia as one of them. This is a debilitating disease. If you've ever known someone who had this mental order, you can probably tick off some of the symptoms -- we'll tick them off for you here, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia, including hallucinations, hearing, seeing, or feeling things that are not there, delusions, disordered thinking. There is a whole list of symptoms.

But really, the sort of most terrible thing about this disease is that only one in five people will actually ever recover from this. While the disease may appear to come on suddenly, there are changes that take place in the brain long before that. That's exactly the subject of a study by a bunch of Australian researchers, who tried to figure out is there a way to predict who is actually going to become schizophrenic. They actually decided to look at using MRI scans, as you mentioned, Paula.

Actually, MRI'd 75 people who are considered high risk because of a family history or something like that, 31 percent of those people subsequently did develop schizophrenia. More importantly, what they say, and we can take a look at some of the pictures here, what they saw were some pretty remarkable and pretty predictable changes in the brain.

Paula, these images may be a little bit hard to see, so I'm just going to direct you to the second row, and look at some of images there that have red in them. That is an area where there is actually some gray matter of the brain that is starting to decrease in mass. In patients who have schizophrenia, what they're finding from this MRI study is that there is actually less gray matter in the right side of the brain and the temporal lobe and the frontal lobe.

Let me just show you my brain model here. You know I love my brain model. But on the frontal lobe, which is here, and the temporal lobe, down here, there is actually less gray matter. The significance of this, Paula, is that perhaps if you were to MRI somebody at high risk and see these changes, you could certainly diagnose early and treat early -- Paula.

ZAHN: So give us the breakdown, because you are so wedded to that brain model, of the different parts of the brain and how they are affected by schizophrenia.

GUPTA: Right. When you talk about schizophrenia, you saw the symptoms, so there are so many different parts of the brain that are sort of at play here, but again, the right frontal part of the brain and the right temporal part of the brain, I'll show you again, are responsible for some specific things. We talked specifically about attention, emotion, social behavior, judgment.

Now, if an individual has lack of volume in this part of the brain, they may be not as sort of proficient at some of those particularly traits, and some of those traits when sort of categorized together make up the symptoms of schizophrenia. The old-fashioned way is to say a certain individuals has all of these traits, delusions, hallucinations and all that, so they look like they have schizophrenia.

With these MRIs and finding these lower part of gray matter in certain parts of the brain, you could say they definitely have it. It's more of a marker.

ZAHN: And the reason why they're so important, Sanjay, you were saying 2.2 million adults every year are affected by this, and 1 percent of our population?

GUPTA: That's right. This is a very widespread disease. It usually affects people really in the prime of their lives, in their early 20s, early 30s, so people are just getting their lives going, and schizophrenia can hit.

Again, if you've ever seen somebody who has this, it can just be a very debilitating thing. But there is no cure for it, Paula, and that's sort of the second step of all this research. While we can screen for these things better, we are talking about that all of the time on your show, screening for diseases earlier, we got to learn thousand treat them. If we can treat people with schizophrenia earlier, they might have a better outcome in life.

ZAHN: All right, Sanjay.

TO ORDER A VIDEO OF THIS TRANSCRIPT, PLEASE CALL 800-CNN-NEWS OR USE OUR SECURE ONLINE ORDER FORM LOCATED AT www.fdch.com




Schizophrenia>