A recent investigation has just suggested that antipsychotic drugs affect the shape and size of the human brain. In a nutshell, they make it shrink. The findings are detailed in the scientific journal, PLOS ONE. Researchers in the UK and in Finland believe that the human brain has a natural tendency to experience a drop in its overall volume as the years go by. That is because the number of brain cells decrease and lose their connections.

However, in the case of individuals who take antipsychotic drugs for considerable periods of time, this will decrease in brain volume occurs at a frightening fast pace, or about 0.7% per year as compared to 0.5% per year.

This claim is based on the data gathered while searching for medical records of 33 people with schizophrenia and 71 other control subjects. The individuals were monitored for 9 years between the ages of 34 and 43 years old, in which scientists with the UK's University of Cambridge and the Finland's University of Oulu kept a close eye on their brain volume loss by means of scans.

As stated in the journal PLOS ONE, the scientists settled on monitoring the brains of folks in the aforementioned age range due to the fact that brain volume loss typically begins when a person is in their thirties and continues well into old age.

What's interesting is that, although the schizophrenia patients who were using antipsychotic drugs were found to lose 0.2% more brain volume annually than healthy individuals, this process was not found to affect their cognitive function, Science Daily informs.

For the time being, the University of Oulu and University of Cambridge researchers cannot explain how and what causes the antipsychotic drugs to act on the brain and encourage volume loss. They wish to further investigate this phenomenon and hope to soon answer these questions.