ABSTRACT
Schizophrenia is a major psychotic illness affecting more than 21 million people worldwide. It causes a series of symptoms that rob the patient of their cognitive thought, their socialisation skills, and ultimately their personality. The discovery of various single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) within the major histocompatability complex (MHC) region of chromosome 6 that are linked to schizophrenia raises the prospect of the cause of schizophrenia being linked to infection. A single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) is a number of variants of just one base within the DNA sequence of a gene. The pathological changes seen in the schizophrenic patient's brain when compared with normal brains at postmortem are not very obvious, but some distinct abnormalities have been consistently reported. Schizoaffective disorder is the term used for those patients who suffer psychotic symptoms more or less continuously with occasional bouts of severe depression, with or without mania. Phenothiazine drugs are used as antipsychotics and sedatives, and some can be used as anti-emetics.
