editorial: “disease-only” alleles and genotypes in complex disorders?

Irj covers a wide range of topics in the fields of social welfare and rehabilitation sciences. schizophrenia (scz) is one of the relevant topics, which associates with enormous psychological and economic burden on the affected families. this multifactorial and debilitating disorder is largely influenced by genetic factors. although several genes and risk factors have been reported for scz, the role of those genes is speculated to be minor in the pathogenesis or the course of the illness. imbalanced higher brain functions such as cognition are the predominant component of scz. since the higher order brain functions are essentially human-specific, it may be hypothesized that human-specific genetic factors are of prime importance in the causation of scz.