Washington, Aug 11: New research has revealed how schizophrenia, a mental disorder which results in hallucinations, memory loss and social withdrawal, works in the brain.

In a new, genetically engineered mouse model, scientists from the Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine (NUFSM) have discovered that the disease symptoms are triggered by a brain protein necessary for neurons to talk to one another.

In human and mouse brains, kalirin is the brain protein needed to build the dense network of highways, called dendritic spines, which allow information to flow from one neuron to another.

Northwestern scientists have found that without adequate kalirin, the frontal cortex of the brain of a person with schizophrenia only has a few narrow roads.

The information from neurons gets jammed up like rush hour traffic on an interstate highway squeezed into a single lane.

"Without enough pathways, the information takes much longer to travel between neurons and much of it will never arrive," said Peter Penzes, senior study author.

"This discovery opens a new direction for treating the devastating cognitive symptoms of schizophrenia," Penzes said.

"There is currently no treatment for that. It suggests that if you can stimulate and amplify the activity of the protein kalirin that remains in the brain, perhaps we can help the symptoms," he said.

These findings were published in a recent issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.