are. However Clozapine does have a fairly serious side effect. It suppresses the production of white blood cells (leukocytes) which leaves the patient susceptible to infection. If this is left untreated it can be fatal. For this reason patients taking clozapine require weekly blood tests so the white blood cell level can be monitored. It the levels get too low the clozapine is exchanged for another anti psychotic drug.The causes of schizophrenia remain unknown. In the past schizophrenia was attributed to poor communication within families. Researchers have for some years made a case that schizophrenia depends partly on genetic disposition. Despite their best efforts researchers do not know how many genes are involved.In 1996 neuroscientists reported their belief that the seeds of schizophrenia are sown during fetal development. The speculation is that brain ‘misconnections’ might develop when the mother catches a virus early in pregnancy. That is when the brain is wired up; nerve cells grow and divide building connections with each other. The basic flaw in the brains of many schizophrenics seems to be that certain nerve cells migrate to the wrong areas when the brain is first taking shape, leaving small regions of the brain permanently out of place or “miswired”. (www.nami.org/helpline/schizo) Such errors in neural architecture may have one or more causes, which remain to be discovered.Evidence for this new theory comes from several different sources including autopsies of patients brains, family movies taken when patients were as young as 2 and epidemiological data. One of the more convincing reports based on tissue from autopsies, showed neurons out of place in the prefrontal areas of 7 out of 20 brains from patients with schizophrenia and in none of the 20 brains from people without the disorder. (www.nami.org/helpline/schizo) The study is the fourth of its kind to report wayward cells in var...
