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The researches obviously treat the word "symptom" in a strictly professional way, so all those questioning themselves "How do you find enough mice with symptoms of schizophrenia in the first place?" are in no luck.

The symptoms are: - Reduced density of pyramidal neurons - Cognitive dysfunction associated with methamphetamine treatment

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Some of the positive symptoms of schizophrenia are delusions, hallucinations, and thought disorder. I'd imagine a mouse could have all those things but how you would know without language is beyond me.

Schizophrenia and the related schizotaxia (a condition that is conjectured to be present in anyone who is schizophrenic) has a number of hidden phenotypes however, such as deficits in eye tracking

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3212396/

something like that must be detectable in animal models.

I don’t think it’s far fetched to assume that this sort of research is backed by years (decades?) of evidence showing we know how to identify schizophrenia in mice. Whether or not this particular study actually matters (or it’s just a flashy headline) is a totally different discussion, but the same patterns human schizophrenics exhibit can’t be that hard to identify without language. Hell, the first picture in the article makes sense to me. Amphetamine salts make humans with this disease draw irrational conclusions. Perhaps that’s an oversimplification, but I don’t think so.

We have tests that measure schizophrenic like behavior in rodents. We've found that drugs that induce schizophrenic like symptoms in people induce these behaviors in rodents. We've also found that drugs that treat schizophrenia in people also treat these behaviors in rodents.

Since this is treatment of schizophrenia caused by a particular genetic mutation, surely the answer is "you get them by breeding them"

In medical jargon, wouldn't those be "signs"? I thought "symptoms" specifically refer to the qualia of the disease as experienced by the patient (e.g. pain, "feeling of ____", etc.)

Perhaps, but in that case there are no symptoms of schizophrenia in mice, correct? I suppose we might be able to deduce "feeling of ___" via behavior monitoring (e.g. hunger) or possibly even brain imaging (e.g. seeing "fear centers light up"), but even then it isn't "as experienced by the patient".

the model exhibits behaviour that we can deduce a schizophrenic mouse would have. Like social withdrawal. Are we sure they have schizophrenia? I am not so sure, and not that qualified to tell if that makes sense

Technically yes, although in practice the overlap between symptoms and signs is pretty significamt and so the distinction is pretty blurry.

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