New research from Washington University suggests that schizophrenia is actually a group of eight distinct disorders, each with a different genetic basis. The findings could eventually open the door to earlier diagnosis and treatment of this debilitating mental disorder, which affects more than 3 million people in the United States . Washington University psychiatric geneticist Robert Cloninger, who helped lead the study, said it was already known that schizophrenia was at least somewhat heritable. But previous research had found only weak or inconsistent links between schizophrenia and individual genes. “People would find genes that were associated with schizophrenia, but when they would go to replicate that ― try to repeat it in another group of people ― it often wouldn’t replicate,” Cloninger said. That suggested that schizophrenia might be caused not by single genes acting alone, but by groups of genes acting together in a complex way. To try to figure that out, Cloninger and his
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