Detect schizophrenia in eye movements

While carrying out research for his doctoral dissertation, Mathijs Raemaekers discovered that when making eye movements, the healthy brothers and sisters of schizophrenia patients have the same abnormal brain activity as these schizophrenia patients.

This means there is a genetic basis for the abnormality and that the genes involved play a role in the development of schizophrenia. It is very likely that in the future, such abnormal brain activity can be used to detect schizophrenia genes in individuals.

Mathijs Raemaekers received his PhD from Utrecht University on September 1. His thesis is titled 'Saccade inhibition in schizophrenia: towards phenotyping based on brain function'.