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Brains of patients with mental disorder schizophrenia attempts to repair themselves, a new study has found.

According to a study conducted by a team of researchers from the United Kingdom and China, brains of schizophrenia patients may have the ability to repair themselves and fight off the mental illness.

Schizophrenia is a mental condition marked by the inability to distinguish between what is right and what is wrong and it is believed to be a degenerative illness.

"Our results highlight that despite the severity of tissue damage, the brain of a patient with schizophrenia is constantly attempting to reorganize itself, possibly to rescue itself or limit the damage," said Lawson Health Research Institute's Dr. Lena Palaniyappan, reported Science Daily.

For the purpose of the study, the research team examined the brains of 98 patients with schizophrenia and 83 patients without and used MRI technology and a special method called "covariance analysis," to distinguish the increase of brain tissue. This is the first time that such a method has been used to reveal the ability of the brain to reverse the effects of the illness.

The researchers found evidence that suggests that schizophrenia patients' brain have the ability to repair themselves to fight the mental illness, reported HNGN.

The study showed that while schizophrenia results in reduction in brain tissue volume, certain regions of the brain showed a subtle increase in tissue over time. It was found that in terms of gray matter volume, the brains of schizophrenic patients become more normal the longer that they have the condition.

"These findings are important not only because of their novelty and the rigor of the study, but because they point the way to the development of targeted treatments that potentially could better address some of the core pathology in schizophrenia," said Dr. Jeffrey Reiss, of London Health Sciences Centre, reported Gizmodo.

"Brain plasticity and the development of related therapies would contribute to a new optimism in an illness that was 100 years ago described as premature dementia for its seemingly progressive deterioration."

The research team's next step is to analyze the brain tissue evaluation by scanning patients with early schizophrenia and studying the effects this brain tissue reorganization has on them.

The study titled "Dynamic cerebral reorganization in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia: a MRI-derived cortical thickness study" have been published in the journal Psychology Medicine.