In a ground breaking study that made use of advanced magnetic resonance imaging, researchers that included both psychologists and neurologists from the prestigious Columbia University believe they have successfully identified a specific area of the human brain that is involved in the very early stages of psychiatric ailments like schizophrenia.

Their findings led them to believe that the careful monitoring of activity in this region may be able to help medical professionals predict the onset of the diseases and allow for the earliest possible treatment for the afflicted as well as the potential for developing new drugs to treat the conditions more effectively, even possibly preventing the onset of schizophrenia altogether.

During the course of their work the researchers undertook the MRI based study of eighteen “high risk” individuals – people displaying “prodromal” symptoms – and followed their progress for a period of 24 months. During the course off the study those who did eventually develop schizophrenia 70% were found to display a significantly increased amount of activity in a region of the hippocampus dubbed the CA1 subfield.

The researchers used a novel adaptation of the functional magnetic resonance imaging technique, one which was originally developed by the study’s lead author Dr Scott Small. Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a completely non invasive technique that can measure the brain’s metabolism, both when active and at rest.

Small and his associates first compared 18 “healthy” brains with those of 18 people who had been previously diagnosed as suffering from schizophrenia. They noted a number of abnormalities in various areas of the “diseased brains” and from there sought to find out which of the regions were affected first in patients displaying a first episode of a psychiatric disorder. All of these subjects were young people who had been previously deemed at high risk for developing schizophrenia or a similar brain disorder.

Co author Scott Schobel MD explained what they discovered “In comparing those high-risk individuals who developed psychosis with those who did not, we found that only the CA1 subfield was abnormal in those young people who went on to develop schizophrenia. We believe that this may give us an early snapshot of disease.”

At the moment there are no tests available to medical professionals that diagnose schizophrenia, and most sufferers are identified by clinical symptoms after other conditions have been ruled out. The hope of the study’s authors is that their findings will help such a thing become a possibility in the future.