The_Relationship_Of_Schizophrenia_And_Dopamine

The Relationship Of Schizophrenia And Dopamine The Relationship of Schizophrenia and Dopamine Schizophrenia is a chronic and debilitating mental illness. Although the cause of schizophrenia is unknown, there are many hypotheses. The most widely accepted explanation is the dopamine hypothesis. Schizophrenia is the most common and destructive kind of psychosis, which is an impairment of thinking that causes the affected person’s interpretation of reality to be severely abnormal. Schizophrenia affects 1% of the adult population including more than 2.7 million Americans. It is typically diagnosed in young adulthood and occurs equally in men and women. The disease usually consists of hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal, flattened emotions, and loss of social and personal care skills. Schizophrenia can be characterized by disturbances in the areas of the brain that are associated with thought, perception, attention, emotion, motor behavior, and life functioning. The symptoms are divided into negative and positive categories. Negative symptoms consist of behavioral deficits such as blunting of emotions, language deficits, and lack of energy. These negative symptoms result in reduced brain activity in the prefrontal cortex. Positive symptoms are frightening as well, but they are not as disabling in the long term as negative symptoms. dopamine, receptors, brain, d1, symptoms, schizophrenia, d2, schizophrenic, patients, drugs, negative, found, causes, activity, treatment, striatum, presynaptic, positive, normal, involved, hypothesis, higher, function, emotions, discovered, d5, d4, contains, brains, binding, behavior, schizophrenia, work, social