Schizophrenia is a common severe psychiatric disorder characterized by perceptual, thought, affective and behavioral disturbances, with significant cognitive impairment and social functioning deficits. The disease usually develops in young and middle-aged adults, mostly with a chronic and prolonged course, and is characterized by easy relapse and disability. Epidemiological studies have shown a lifetime prevalence of approximately 1% in the general population, with increasing prevalence with proximity to relatives. Children of identical twins or couples who share schizophrenia have a 40-50% homozygosity rate. Genetic factors are the most important causative factors for schizophrenia, with a heritability of about 80%. The results of numerous studies suggest that the inheritance pattern of schizophrenia does not conform to Mendelian inheritance laws and is not a monogenic disease, but rather a multifactorial complex disease, i.e., a disease caused by multiple micro-effective genes acting in concert with environmental factors. Recent studies based on the neurodevelopmental hypothesis have revealed the existence of multiple disease susceptibility genes within highly interlocking regions of schizophrenia. Functional studies have shown that these susceptibility genes encode proteins that directly or indirectly affect NMDA receptor-mediated glutamatergic or dopaminergic synaptic transmission and other neurodevelopmental processes, and are located within highly interlocking chromosomal regions in schizophrenia as indicated by genome-wide scans. Currently effective therapeutic drugs for schizophrenia also target each of these classical neurotransmitter systems, and with further research in molecular genetics and molecular biology, revealing alternative hypotheses for the pathogenesis of schizophrenia may bring light to the treatment and prognosis of the disease.