Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder may share more than a propensity for wreaking havoc on mental life. These severe psychiatric disorders, each of which occurs in about 1 in 100 adults, rest on identical flaws in a set of genes that produce a protective covering for brain cells, a new study suggests.
The critical genes are active in brain cells called oligodendrocytes, say neuroscientist Sabine Bahn of the University of Cambridge in England and her colleagues.
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