Schizophrenia - Future Research (2)

Dr. Sukhi Shergill discusses exciting possibilities for future research into schizophrenia.

I think one of the most exciting things to happen in the last 10 years, is the ability to use technology to actually see what’s happening going on in the brains of people who have become ill, especially with psychiatric-type disorders. These are the disorders that we broadly describe as neuropsychiatric disorders. For the very first time we’ve got the technology to see which parts of the brain are doing what. And also then, once we know that, we can then go on to see which parts of the brain are not working properly. And that previously was not possible because in the past what we’ve had to do was wait for somebody to die and then look at their brain. And by looking at their brain, see that one bit of the brain doesn’t seem to be working properly and trying to work backwards to say this is the problem that they had, and this is the brain region that wasn’t working properly, therefore that bit of brain must be doing this. So we’re in an extremely fortunate position now, by using these technologies like MEG machines, you can look that up on 'Google,' or that functional MRI machine, that we can actually look at brain activity in healthy living people and use that to try and educate ourselves as to what goes wrong in patients who develop neuropsychiatric disorders.