Each year, more than two million people in the U.S. alone are diagnosed with the debilitating mental illness known as Schizophrenia. For more than a century, scientists have unsuccessfully struggled to unravel the mystery of this disorder, which often strikes people in their teens or early 20’s, and is characterized by hallucinations, delusions and social withdrawal.

But now researchers have uncovered a vital clue, which they believe may not only help lift the veil on schizophrenia, but result in early detection, which could be critical to effective pre-emptive treatment.

Recently, certain genes have been identified that appear to increase risk for the disorder. Building on that, scientists at UCLA have found that certain changes in the "white" matter in brains of adolescents who are gene-prone to the disease do not develop at the same rate as healthy individuals.

Using the popular analogy for the brain being a series of computer networks, white matter--or connective nerve tissue--represents a cable running between computers, passing vital messages along the chain; grey matter, on the other hand, is thought of as the actual computers, and is comprised of individual nerve cells.

The study’s chief author said, “We found that healthy subjects showed a normal and expected increase in measures indexing white matter integrity in the temporal lobe as they age. But young people at high-risk for psychosis showed no such increase—that is, they fail to show the normal developmental pattern.”

While scientists still don’t know what causes this change, they can use special imaging techniques to predict the onset of the disease more than a year in advance.  By doing so, they can “identify people who will need more or different treatments in the future.”