A certain molecular axis including the transcription factor the early growth response protein 1 (EGR1), miR-30a-5p, and its target gene NEUROD1 has been shown to differentiate schizophrenia patients from healthy subjects with diagnostic accuracy of 0.962 which was far higher than the diagnostic power of miR-30a-5p alone. Here, EGR1 is linked to schizophrenia.