Outline and evaluate biological explanations for schizophrenia

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Outline and evaluate biological explanations for schizophrenia

There appears to be a tendency for schizophrenia to run in families. This suggests that genesplay a role. The closer the genetic relationship the more likely the people are to share thedisorder. Evidence from family studies by Gottesman showed that when both parent areschizophrenic then there is a 46% chance of the child getting it, however, if only one parenthad it, it dropped to 16% and dropped to a further 1% when the sibling of the child hadschizophrenia. This suggests that a genetic factor is involved. Gottesman also looked atschizophrenics whose father had an identical twin. He found that there was a 17% of beingschizophrenic when the father was but he also found that there was also 17% chance of developing the disease when the father's twin had schizophrenia but the father didn't.MZ twins share 100% of their genes; DZ twins share 50% of their genes. If genes are a factor we would expect more identical twins to share the disorder than non-identical. Rosenthal tooka case study which had a set of female quadruplets. They all developed schizophreniaalthough the onset and symptoms were very different. This could have been a result of