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"Jumping Genes" Linked To Schizophrenia
sciencehabit writes "Roaming bits of DNA that can relocate and proliferate throughout the genome, called 'jumping genes,' may contribute to schizophrenia, a new study suggests (abstract). These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease. The study could help explain how genes and environment work together to produce the complex disorder and may even point to ways of lowering the risk of the disease, researchers say."
These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease.
What sort of pregnancies and stressful events are deceased people having?
Jumping genes are better known as retroposons. Shame on Science for not explaining this.
Everyone moods to be examined at birth, or before. Full testing is the only way!
"These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events"
You'd think that after dying there wouldn't be many events one would consider "stressful". But I would suppose that depends on where you ended up after shuffling off this mortal coil...
There is no such thing as 'schizophrenia', it is just a name given to a set of BEHAVIOURS. Just like 'Tourette's syndrome', 'Autism', and 'Aspergers', all just NAMES given to BEHAVIOURS.
You might as well say "the evil spirits POSSESSED this man". It's exactly the same, and just as unscientific.
Still, let's deny that what happens to a child affects their personality in any way... their genes did it, right?
The genes are not really jumping; you're just hallucinating that.
Table-ized A.I.
Better or worse than the "normal" type? Watch out for schizophrenic zombies!
-in? I have bipolar-type schizoaffective disorder. It is somewhat like being manic depressive and schizophrenic at the same time. studies of twins who were adopted to different families at birth lead us to conclude manic depression is genetic. schizophrenia is thought to be due to infectious disease. One possibility is the mother having influenza during one's gestation. It has been known since the nineteen fifties that there is a strong correlation between having cats as a small child, and being schizophrenic as an adult. We have not yet confirmed the cause of this, but it is thought to be due to the same cat feces parasite that causes toxoplasmosis in pregnant women. In fact I myself had two cats since I was an infant. there are many, many different types of schizophrenia, so they may all be distinctly different diseases, with different causes.
Please mail me URLs of software employers.
The Bad News: They have schizophrenia.
The Good News: They're deceased, so their schizophrenia doesn't affect them anymore!
There's little evidence that what happens to children causes these disorders in adults. Barring organic brain damage, it's the underlying thought processes that cause a lot of dysfunction later on, but it's not the events themselves. Which is why one child might be scarred for life by being molested and another emerges relatively unscathed to become an advocate for the abused. The difference is primarily in how the children thought about the events. This applies to most other things as well, the way that you view and cope with the event is far more important to ones future risks of mental illness than the event itself.
There's also typically a genetic component that makes it easier or harder to cope with such situations as well as a cultural aspect that may include more or less helpful responses to the event.
Schizophrenia isn't a collection of behaviors, the behaviors are what psychologists use to identify the disorder, but it's not what causes the disorder. Now, if we started to give everybody in the general populace a SPECT or fMRI to see if they needed treatment, we would likely find that the diagnostic criteria change, but as people don't come in for random screenings against every possible mental illness, the screenings tend to focus on the behaviors. I expect that this will change as the brain scanning techniques become more affordable. Even a relatively inexpensive SPECT scan runs several grand and is overkill in most cases.
What you're arguing is like there being no such thing as a table because it's just a label given to movable objects that have a flat surface on top to hold things on while you're working.
saying these make up more than 50 percent of the code in your DNA is not something I've seen in medical genetics.
Perhaps their might be some confusion between "hot spots" or coding mishap regions which cause miRNA, siRNA, mRNA, and cisRNA to recode protein segments in response to environmental conditions, which can include stress (which is a factor, including environmental biochemical stress during pregnancy) and inflammation (which is a severe factor).
But the statement in the actual article that this is 50 percent of the Human Genome is not what I would describe as an accurate depiction.
You're confusing frame relay switch effects from loops in DNA coding, which may be there for good reasons to adapt to changing environmental or other stress conditions, or are survivor characteristics from prior infections and biochemical events in human history (plagues, massive food diet changes), with "half your DNA is damaged and you should blame your mom cause she stressed out when she was pregnant".
Just my two cents.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
You say illegal discrimination.
I say "China 1-child policy". See what I did there? So much for amero-centrism.
"To investigate that question, principal investigator Kazuya Iwamoto, a neuroscientist; Kato; and their team at RIKEN extracted brain tissue of deceased people who had been diagnosed with schizophrenia as well as several other mental disorders, extracted DNA from their neurons, and compared it with that of healthy people"
..
Presumably these schizophrenics would have been on long term antipsychotic medication. I wonder would this account for the increase in L1. How were these 'healthy people' defined as 'healthy', who gets to do the defining and mightn't a number of 'schizophrenics' have escaped diagnose by not having come into contact with the psychiatric profession. Schizophrenics are people unfortunatly disgnosed as schizophrenics by the psychiatric profession
A diagnosis of schizophrenia is indicated when getting rid of a rival sibling in an inheritance dispute or an obstreperous wife in societies where divorce isn't allowed. Read up on R.D Lang and Thomas S. Szasz, they both state that the mental health industry is bogus.
TFA says
One tantalizing possibility is that as these restless bits of DNA drift throughout the genomes of human brain cells, they help create the vibrant cognitive diversity that helps humans as a species respond to changing environmental conditions, and produces extraordinary "outliers," including innovators and geniuses such as Picasso,
But didn't they observe the same thing on mices?
To add to the biological component, some study has attempted to link Celiac Disease in the mother to underdevelopment of key brain areas in the infant that lead to disorders such as schizophrenia. Makes sense, too, since the mother's body is busy "fighting" gluten and thus fighting it in the developing fetus as well, or so I understood it.
Schizoaffective sucks - if you need a good place to go, message me (if there's a way to do that?). There are plenty of good communities, and I know one that's been very helpful for friends of mine.
Best of luck to you!
What is schizophrenia?
Schizophrenia due to infectious disease of the bra
Either you're into some weird stuff, your you need to watch the length limits of your subjects.
This being a fungus? It travels all over the body, has DNA, grows when the immune system is suppressed (ie. stress), and causes DNA mutation in cells.