Author(s)

Xinyue Chen, Jiaxuan Li, Zhengyi Li

Corresponding Author

Zhengyi Li

ABSTRACT

Schizophrenia is a serious mental disease that accounts for 0.5-1% of the world’s population. Patients with this disease show positive symptoms (hallucination and delusion) and negative symptoms (lack of emotion, behavior, and language deficits). Both physical and genetic factors can cause schizophrenia, with the latter confirmed in multiple studies. Several candidate genes that play roles in regulating brain activities were indicated to contribute to the disease. Patients with mutations on these schizophrenia-related genes were observed to have developmental and anatomical abnormalities in their brains. The gene of NRG1 is the only one to be identified in both meta-analyses and genome-wide linkage scans. Therefore, in-depth studies on the relationship between NRG1 and schizophrenia are suggested to be conveyed. NRG1 is a trophic factor that activates ErbB receptor tyrosine kinases. NRG1-ErbB signaling functions in both brain development and adult brain, whose perturbation may lead to cognitive impairments and other symptoms observed in patients with schizophrenia. In this article, the disease of schizophrenia will be introduced from different aspects, including its clinical manifestations, its harm, and causes. NRG1 and NRG1-ErbB signaling functions in the brain and how mutations in the coding region of NRG1, generated by single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs), are related to schizophrenia analyzed. The treatments of schizophrenia are classified as pharmacological therapies and nonpharmacological therapies. Studied on the novel genetic therapy of CRISPR will also be mentioned.

KEYWORDS

Schizophrenia, NRG1, single nucleotide polymorphisms