ISRAEL: Sniffing out schizophrenia using nose cell samples

Record ID: 397820

  • Title: ISRAEL: Sniffing out schizophrenia using nose cell samples
  • Date: 3rd July 2013
  • Summary: VIEW OF SLIDE OF MONITOR READING 'NATURAL HISTORY OF SCHIZOPHRENIA: CAN WE PREDICT IN THE PREMORBID STAGE?'
  • Embargoed: 18th July 2013 13:00
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  • Location: United Kingdom
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVA2E5WE7PT9N3TU7QUJ2WG9LGKE
  • Story Text: A small sample from the nose could lead to the first ever biological diagnosis of schizophrenia, according to a team of Israeli-U.S. researchers.
    Currently patients are diagnosed by psychiatrists based on interviews and a clinical evaluation of their behaviour, but Doctor Noam Shomron of Tel Aviv University and a team of researchers from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, say their research could allow doctors to make a medical pronouncement.
    "We wanted to take a different approach and our approach, together with Professor Ruth Navon and Professor Akira Sawa, were to identify molecular markers, so for the first time we wanted to see whether there is a molecular marker in the neurones that can evaluate disease versus healthy individuals," said Doctor Shomron.
    The procedure, which takes only a few minutes, includes a swabbing from the subject's nose to extract nerve cells from as close as possible to the brain, in the upper nasal cavity of the olfactory epithelium (OE). Until now, Shomron said, schizophrenia biomarkers were previously found only in the brain's neuron cells, which can only be collected during autopsies.
    The cells from the OE are then grown in a laboratory and the molecular markers, called MicroRNAs, are profiled. The MicroRNAs are responsible for the cell's epigenetics, or genetic expression, which in previous research have been shown to play an important role in the development of various diseases.
    In a sample of 25 schizophrenic patients and 25 people without the condition, the first molecular mark for schizophrenia in live patients was spotted.
    "Our goal is to simplify genetic disorders mainly of the brain in order to identify clear markers indicating where this individual is healthy or diseased," said Shomron.
    Schizophrenia is a psychiatric disorder that affects around one in 100 people world-wide. Its most common symptoms are delusions and auditory hallucinations, or hearing voices.
    In future studies, Shomron says, they plan to examine identical twins where one suffers from a disease and the other is healthy in order to evaluate whether the MicroRNA regulators are a cause or a byproduct. If they succeed in identifying the exact functions of the molecules, they will then be able to determine if they can be used as early diagnostic markers. A patient's nasal tissue could be collected in a quick outpatient procedure, and microRNA profiles could be generated in a few hours.
    For psychiatrists, the findings could potentially change the way in which they diagnose patients with schizophrenia. Doctor Mark Weiser, Chairman of Psychiatry at Tel Aviv University and chief psychiatrist at Sheba Medical Center, said the findings could be "a real breakthrough."
    "This has to all be taken very carefully and very conservatively, we are talking about people's lives here but if in fact this replicates and if this finding of the micro RNA which are present in patients with schizophrenia and or their levels are significantly higher in patients with schizophrenia and lower in controls this could be a huge breakthrough,".
    Shomron says testing has begun in bipolar patients and more recently on patients with Post Traumatic Syndrome (PTS).
    Weiser said early therapeutic intervention could improve the outcomes of many patients. "As this field will develop, or we hope, that they will also be able to look at response to medication and hopefully as this field develops we would also be looking to see what markers would predict response to this medication as opposed to a different set of biological markers which predict response to a different medication," said Doctor Weiser.
    "The potential of these micro RNAs, biological markers, is huge and could have a real affect on our day to day work in treating patients with schizophrenia and severe mental illness," he added.
    Although the findings were promising, Shomron emphasised that the experiments are still only in the initial stages and could take many more years to reach the clinical evaluation stage. The first stage is to understand the possible causes of schizophrenia. The second, potentially more difficult, stage is to then try to correct them.
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