Saving Troubled Minds

By Anne Burke

Published Oct 1, 2006 8:00 AM

Tyrone Cannon, who is leading UCLA's
search for a cure for the disease

Copyright ©Reed Hutchinson '71

At this early stage of the disease, known as the prodrome, tweens and teens are mostly aware that the vexing sounds and sensations are just their mind playing tricks on them. For these early-onset patients, new scientific studies suggest that antipsychotic drugs, despite their unpleasant side effects, "seem to make a difference in reducing the rate of transition to psychosis," says the center's clinical director, Mary Patricia O'Brien. Moreover, anecdotal evidence indicates that young people experiencing pre-psychotic symptoms benefit from psychosocial interventions, explains O'Brien, who is married to Cannon.

Worldwide, there only are a handful of research clinics devoted to the prodromal phase of schizophrenia. One of the most highly regarded is CAPPS, which is part of UCLA's Neuropsychiatric Institute. Cannon, 43, established the clinic shortly after he came to UCLA in 1999 as an up-and-coming researcher. Tall and boyish-looking, Cannon is a Boise, Idaho, native who favors blue jeans in the office. He is articulate, soft-spoken and familiar firsthand with the consequences of the disease he fights.

One of the scientist's relatives suffered from schizophrenia and another from bipolar disorder, which, like schizophrenia, is probably related to a biochemical abnormality in the brain. Listening to his parents, Doug and Jan, talk about these relatives, and later meeting them, excited Cannon's youthful curiosity about how they came to be so different from everyone else in his family.

Cannon attended Dartmouth, where he read the classics and studied psychology, paying particular attention to severe psychopathologies like schizophrenia, which he found especially fascinating. Intending to pursue a career as a clinical therapist, he studied at USC under Sarnoff Mednick, the scientist perhaps best known for his study of Danish children born to schizophrenic mothers. After USC, Cannon came to Westwood to do clinical training at the Neuropsychiatric Institute. But he became increasingly skeptical of the ability of psychological treatments like talk therapy to do much good for very sick people whose illnesses were tied to neurochemical imbalances in the brain.

What really interested Cannon was finding a cure. He left the therapist's office for the research lab and began his quest in earnest.

Despite intense investigation over many years and across many continents, little was known about the underlying causes of schizophrenia, aside from the fact that the disease was linked to both genetics and disruptions in utero, such as a viral infection in the mother or a shortage of oxygen to the fetal brain. One of Cannon's first research projects, at the University of Pennsylvania, was a study that looked at genetic and environmental causes of schizophrenia in same-sex twins born between 1940 and 1957 in Finland. Cannon's team showed that genetic factors accounted for more than 80 percent of schizophrenia cases, while less than 20 percent were due to environmental factors such as in utero disruptions.