The Media Line: Study Links Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia, and Autism to a Shared Brain Mechanism  

Study Links Alzheimer’s, Schizophrenia, and Autism to a Shared Brain Mechanism  

By The Media Line Staff  

A new study from the University of Haifa suggests that disorders as different as Alzheimer’s, schizophrenia, and autism may share the same biological problem in the brain: damage to the extracellular matrix, the supportive tissue that surrounds neurons and helps organize how brain networks function.   

The research, published in Neurobiology of Disease, points to a repeated pattern of disrupted gene activity across diseases that are usually treated as unrelated.  

Prof. Shani Stern, who led the project, said the results shift attention away from neurons alone and toward the environment they operate in. “The findings show that the most prominent changes do not occur only within the neurons themselves, but also in the extracellular environment of the central nervous system, which plays a central role in regulating communication and stability of brain networks,” she said.  

The team set out to determine whether very different neurological, psychiatric, and developmental disorders share any common biological signatures. To do this, they re-analyzed data from 41 previous studies, using a wide range of human-based material: postmortem brain tissue, neurons grown from induced pluripotent stem cells, and 3-D miniature brain models that mimic early and later stages of neural development. In total, genetic information from 836 patients was compared with samples from 636 healthy people.  

The analysis revealed 31 genes that consistently behaved abnormally across all three disorder groups. Many of these genes help build or maintain the brain’s extracellular matrix or influence how cells move and how blood vessels develop within the central nervous system. One gene, SST—which plays a role in regulating brain activity and cognition—appeared especially frequently. The study also detected repeated changes in GFAP and IFITM3, two genes linked to support-cell activity and inflammatory responses.  

The researchers say these patterns point to shared biological mechanisms that cut across traditional diagnostic categories. “The fact that the same genes and biological pathways repeatedly appear across different disorders suggests the existence of shared mechanisms at the system level,” they concluded. The study adds to growing evidence that the extracellular matrix is not merely structural tissue but an active regulator of communication between neurons and the support cells around them.  

The team says these disruptions could help explain why symptoms overlap among different conditions—and why patients often experience more than one neurological or psychiatric disorder over the course of their lives.