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The likelihood of developing neuropsychiatric disorders is determined before birth
Last reviewed: 30.06.2025
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Different activity of genes that control the formation of the brain in the embryo determines the likelihood of developing neuropsychiatric disorders, and also has a decisive influence on the difference in the architecture of the male and female brain.
The formation of billions of nerve cells and the many connections between them in the human genome accounts for 86% of all genes. Work on studying the role of each "nerve" gene in the formation of the brain has been going on for a long time. But it is not enough to know which gene is responsible for what. It is also necessary to take into account that genes can exhibit different activity depending on different situations, on where they are located, and on what phase of development the nervous system has entered.
Scientists from Yale University (USA) conducted a large-scale study to find out the spatiotemporal features of the work of genes that determine the appearance of the human brain. They processed 1,340 samples of nervous tissue taken at various stages of human development, from a 40-day embryo to an 80-year-old person. As a result, a huge picture of genetic activity was obtained, including 1.9 billion parameters.
An analysis of such data, published in the journal Nature, served as the basis for many conclusions, but among the most interesting ones are the following. The area of interest of the researchers, naturally, could not fail to include genes associated with the development of schizophrenia and autism. Symptoms of both diseases are believed to be recognizable in the first years of a person's life or at the early stages of growing up. The results of the analysis of gene activity completely coincide with this: it was shown that these genes are switched on even before birth. The work of these genes at the prenatal stage determines whether a person will develop schizophrenia in the future or not.
Also, even during the embryonic development of a person, gender differences in gene activity begin to appear. Scientists believed that the difference between a man and a woman would be limited only to genes located in the Y chromosome. But it turned out that many genes responsible for the formation of the brain and present in both sexes work differently in men and women, and this difference is noticeable even before birth. Simply put, intersexual differences in the architecture of the brain, as well as a predisposition to neuropsychiatric diseases, are mostly formed at the stage of fetal development.
At the same time, of course, it should be remembered that the work did not take into account the influence of exogenous factors that can slow down the development of schizophrenia. During life, external factors are capable of directing the action of other genes that will counteract the first ones that did not work correctly in the embryo. As for intersexual differences, it is still extremely difficult to imagine such external factors that would reduce gender characteristics to "no".