Statistics for Biological Explanation to Schizophrenia

Click here to take the quiz!

General Stats
Answer Stats
Score Distribution
Your Score History

General Stats

This quiz has been taken 2 times
The average score is 3 of 47

Answer Stats

Hint	Answer	% Correct
What kind of disorder is schizophrenia?	Psychotic	100%
How much less is the life expectancy for someone with schizophrenia?	10 years less	50%
What is excess dopamine also known as?	Hyperdopaminergia	50%
What symptoms are more objective?	Negative symptoms	50%
What is the biological explanation of schizophrenia entail?	Neurotransmitters	50%
What is the prognosis (likely course) for schizophrenia?	25% of people have 1 episode and don't have another episode. 50% of people have recurrent episodes, in between they are symptom free. 25% of people have continuous symptoms	0%
What did Brown and Birley (1968) find?	50% of schizophrenic patients reported a major life event in the 3 weeks prior to relapse, highlighting social factors.	0%
What are positive symptoms?	Additions to normal behaviours	0%
What is the mesocortical pathway?	A dopamine pathway associated with motivation and emotion	0%
What is the mesolimbic pathway?	A dopamine pathway associated with reward and pleasure	0%
What did Zipursky et al (2007) find?	A review article found that blocking dopamine receptors does not always remove the symptoms inn patients who had schizophrenia for 10 years or more, even if the block is 90% effective.	0%
What did Wright (2014) suggest?	As many as 700 genes have been linked to schizophrenia and the number continues to grow.	0%
What is the prevalence (how common) for schizophrenia?	Between 0.7% and 1%	0%
What kind of symptoms does Schizophrenia have?	Both positive and negative	0%
How can schizophrenia be explained by hypersensitivity of dopamine receptors?	Certain D2 dopamine receptors get hypersensitive and sets of schizophrenia.	0%
What did Gottesman and Shields (1966) find?	Concordance rates for severe schizophrenia was much higher in MZ twins (75%) than DZ twins (22%).	0%
What do positive symptoms include?	Delusions, Hallucinations, Disorganised thinking and speech, abnormal motor behaviour	0%
Examples of delusions	Delusions of reference, Delusions of Grandeur, Delusions of persecution, Thought insertion and thought broadcasting	0%
What is psychosis a general term for?	Disorders that involve a loss of contact with reality	0%
How can positive symptoms be explained by?	Excess dopamine activity in the mesolimbic pathway	0%
How can schizophrenia be explained by excess dopamine receptors?	Excess numbers of dopamine receptors in the synapses can lead to schizophrenia.	0%
What other neurotransmitters might play a role in schizophrenia?	GABA and glutamate	0%
How does DiGeorge syndrome explain schizophrenia through genetics?	Genes may mutate due to environmental factors or an error in cell division. DiGeorge syndrome occurs when 30-40 neighbouring genes are deleted. As many as 25% of people with this condition later develop schizophrenia.	0%
What is another biological explanation for schizophrenia?	Genetics	0%
How can schizophrenia be explained by high levels of dopamine?	High levels of dopamine build up because of low levels of enzyme beta hydroxylase. Excess dopamine in the synapses	0%
What is dopamine deficiency known as?	Hypodopaminergia	0%
What are cognitive symptoms?	Issues to do with information processing	0%
What do negative symptoms include?	Lack of energy and motivation, Social withdrawal, Flatness of emotion, No care for appearance or oneself, Lack of pleasure, speaking little	0%
How can negative symptoms be explained by?	Low levels of dopamine in the mesocortical pathway	0%
What is the evidence from drug treatments?	Many antipsychotic medications used to treat schizophrenia work by blocking dopamine	0%
Weaknesses of this theory?	Not all patients respond the antipsychotic drugs. The theory can't prove that excess dopamine causes schizophrenia and rather it may be a symptom. Reductionist.	0%
When is the peak onset for schizophrenia?	Peak onset for males is early to mid-twenties and late twenties for females	0%
How does the DISC1 gene link to schizophrenia?	People with an abnormality in this gene are 1.4 times more likely to develop schizophrenia (Kim et al, 2012).	0%
What did Owen (1978) find?	People with schizophrenia had higher density of dopamine receptors in the cerebral cortex.	0%
How does Carlsson et al.(1999/2000) support this theory?	Scanning shows that people with schizophrenia are more sensitive to excess dopamine than others.	0%
What did Gottesman and Shields (1966) conclude?	Schizophrenia does have a biological basis as the chance to develop schizophrenia is influenced genetically	0%
How can negative symptoms be explained by irregular serotonin activity?	Serotonin regulates dopamine levels in areas such as the mesolimbic pathway so irregular serotonin activity changes the levels of dopamine.	0%
What did Alpert and Friedhoff (1980) find?	Some patients didn't improve at all after taking dopamine antagonists	0%
Strengths of this explanation?	Supporting evidence, scientifically credible and has useful applications with genetic councelling	0%
What specific genes have been associated to schizophrenia?	The COMT gene and the DISC1 gene	0%
What does the DISC1 gene code?	The creation of GABA, which regulates other neurotransmitters such as glutamate and dopamine in the limbic system	0%
How does the COMT gene link to schizophrenia?	The deletion of the COMT gene from the DiGeorge syndrome leads to high levels of dopamine as COMT regulates dopamine levels	0%
What does DISC1 stand for?	The Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia 1	0%
What are negative symptoms?	The loss or absence of normal characteristics	0%
Strengths of this theory?	Theory explains both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia. Testable evidence as people given a drug for Parkinson's disease by increasing dopamine production can experience hallucinations.	0%
What did Hilker et al (2018) find?	There is a 79% heritability rate for schizophrenia.	0%
Weaknesses of this explanation?	Twin studies have flawed methodologies as MZ twins may be treated more similarly than DZ twins and this may not actually explain schizophrenia. Wright (2014) highlights confusion to which genes a responsible for Schizophrenia. Reductionist	0%