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Pruning hypothesis comes of age

The idea that disrupted pruning of neuronal connections in the brain during adolescence is a cause of schizophrenia was proposed in 1983. This proved prescient, as subsequent imaging, genetic and molecular research has shown.
  1. Matthew B. Johnson

    1. Matthew B. Johnson is at the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA, and at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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  2. Beth Stevens

    1. Beth Stevens is at the F. M. Kirby Neurobiology Center, Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, Boston, Massachusetts 02115, USA, and at the Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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It is common knowledge among neuroscientists today that the brain’s frontal lobe, which is involved in many complex human behaviours, continues to develop throughout adolescence and into early adulthood. But in 1983, the idea of such protracted brain development was, in the words of the psychiatrist Irwin Feinberg, “a newly emerging theme”1. That year, he published the hypothesis1 that schizophrenia is caused by defects in a particular aspect of adolescent brain development. Genomic studies are now beginning to shed long-awaited light on the mechanisms that might underlie such a process.

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Nature 554, 438-439 (2018)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-018-02053-7

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