When a person suffers from schizophrenia, he will suffer from symptoms like hearing voices and experiencing delusions. Once a patient goes into an episode, chances are he will go into relapse.

Early treatment of schizophrenia could prevent that first episode from happening, but early detection and diagnosis of the mental illness is difficult to do.

A recent study by the Silvio Conte Center for the Neuroscience of Mental Disorders at the Washington University School of Medicine hopes to find a way of early detection of the mental illness by looking for physical manifestations.

The researchers found that the siblings of patients suffering from schizophrenia display the same subtle shape abnormality in the brain, suggesting that there may be a link between the abnormality and the illness.

The study performed brain MRI scans on 25 schizophrenia patients and their siblings, and compared them to brain scans of 40 healthy volunteers and their siblings. The schizophrenic patients and their siblings showed evidence of the same shape abnormalities in the thalamus, the part of the brain that relays sensory information to the brain's cortex.

The researchers of the study hope to find a link between these abnormalities and schizophrenia. If the abnormal shapes turn out to be biological markers for the illness, perhaps a way to detect schizophrenia in its early stages could be found.