ANDRZEJ KRAUZEAs a psychiatrist at Western University in London, Ontario, Lena Palaniyappan regularly sees patients with schizophrenia, the chronic mental disorder that drastically affects how a person thinks, feels, and behaves. The disorder can be devastating, often involving hallucinations and delusions. But one thing Palaniyappan and other mental health professionals have noticed is that, unlike those with degenerative neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s disease, Huntington’s, or Parkinson’s, sometimes schizophrenia patients eventually start to improve.
“In the clinic we do actually see patients with schizophrenia having a very relentless progress in early years,” Palaniyappan says. “But a lot of them do get better over the years, or they don’t progress as [quickly].” So far, most research has focused on the neurological decline associated with schizophrenia—typically involving a loss of brain tissue. Palaniyappan and his colleagues wondered whether there might be “something happening in the brain [that] helps them come to a state of stability.”
To get at this question, he and his colleagues performed MRI scans to assess the cortical thickness of 98 schizophrenia patients at various stages of illness. Sure enough, the researchers noted that, while patients who were less than two years removed from their diagnosis had significantly ...
