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Schizophrenia Is Not a Single Disease
An anonymous reader writes: New research from Washington University has found that the condition known as schizophrenia is not just a single disease, but instead a collection of eight different disorders. For years, researchers struggled to understand the genetic basis of schizophrenia. This new method was able to isolate and identify the different conditions (each with its own symptoms) currently classified under the same heading (abstract, full text). "In some patients with hallucinations or delusions, for example, the researchers matched distinct genetic features to patients' symptoms, demonstrating that specific genetic variations interacted to create a 95 percent certainty of schizophrenia. In another group, they found that disorganized speech and behavior were specifically associated with a set of DNA variations that carried a 100 percent risk of schizophrenia." According to one of the study's authors, "By identifying groups of genetic variations and matching them to symptoms in individual patients, it soon may be possible to target treatments to specific pathways that cause problems."
If it is embedded in DNA, is it hereditary?
If it is, I hope it does not bring back Eugenics or the forced sterilization practices of the early 19th century. That didn't end well on several fronts.
I wonder if the depression and anxiety are more side effects of the medications used to treat schizophrenia, or effects of trying to avoid discrimination against people with schizophrenia due to its misrepresentation by Hollywood, as a recent Cracked article suggests.
No, he's thinking of multiple personality disorder, which is extremely rare and much different than schizophrenia. It's confused with schizophrenia because of the hallucinatory voices common in schizophrenia, but those "voices" aren't different personalities of the afflicted; they're just hallucinations. Multiple personality disorder is the split personality one -- the person is basically like Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, although the personalities don't have to be good/evil or working at cross purposes to each other, and there can be more than two.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
One of the problems of Psychiatry is that because the brain has been bit of a black box to us for so long (We can see the input, we can see the output, but the gears and cogs inside remain a bit of a mystery) disorder classification has been mostly about symptomology rather than causes, most of the time. Docs have long suspected that "schizophrenia" was a collection of disorders with similar-ish results. This finding appears to confirm it.
See also: ADHD and Autism.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Dogs have had many more generations of breeding to tailor their responses to us than we have had to them - something like 10x as many generations, since they breed about 10x quicker than humans. So they can read us much better than we can read them - they've self-selected for that ability, since the ones that can read us best know best how to suck up to us and get us to feed and shelter them and pick up their poop. Todays dogs are specialists - and their specialty is humans.
Given this, dogs are probably better judges of people than we are.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I've always wondered whether someone experiencing audio hallucinations they couldn't distinguish from real sounds could use software as a prosthetic. Say, write a program to continuously sample sound, display the past 5 minutes or so of waveform history on-screen, do realtime speech recognition, and annotate the waveform display with a transcript of what it thought it heard... so if they thought they heard something really disturbing, they could look at the display to see whether there was an organized waveform a few moments earlier, and listen to it again if they wanted to be sure..
If someone with schizophrenia did that, would it help? Or would it stimulate the development of new neural pathways & eventually make matters worse by inducing visual hallucinations on top of the auditory ones in an attempt to bring their physical perception of reality in line with their mental one?
That would likely help. For those that don't know if the hallucinations are real. However, the problem with hallucinations is that they'll drive you nuts even if you know they're not real. I remember the hallucinations would get so loud that I'd yell at them even though I knew they weren't real because I could barely hear anything else.
The trick is that doctors need to stop treating schizophrenics like we're sick. They need to start treating us like we're real people that just happen to have a different sense of reality. Trying to force us to buy into a reality that's every bit as fake as the one they're trying to get us to give up is ludicrous. It's not curable per se, but if we're given the tools to evaluate things for ourselves, the brain will eventually rewire itself in a way that's more functional.
Ultimately, people need to accept the symptoms as symptoms. Trying to fight the disorder is a losing battle. Eventually I got to the point where I missed the voices and started to intentionally cause the hallucinations. Before too long I was having trouble maintaining them and that aspect of the disorder was more or less gone.
The rest is really psycho-social education. It's not that schizophrenics can't be treated or virtually cured, it's that the mental health establishment makes more money with ineffectual treatments than it does for treatments that would improve the situation. There's some very good work being done in the neurosciences that could make a huge difference. Unfortunately, it would put psychologists completely out of business as it requires work from psychiatrists and therapists, but not psychologists.
oh man...so is crazy genetic?
no...but this study is from the University of Washington St. Louis wants to say it is...they analyzed data and this is what they conclude, from full text:
That's what they say..."group of heritable disorders"...it reminds me of when I studied Mendell in HS science and fruit flies and hemophilia.
It sounds fish as hell to me...psychology is great but it's so often wrong. ex: one year the DSM lists 'homosexuality' as an actual disorder...next year...not a disorder! magic!
again...i actually love psychology...but it's just full of random theories from the 19th century that are floating around...so many disorders to describe very similar and overlapping symptoms...symptoms very often open to interpretation...
I wanted to see if this passed the basic "correlation is causation" test...because this is just spreadsheets here these guys are looking at...they are re-analyzing data.
From the full text:
Emphasis added. Honestly that's enough for me to want to see it for myself, the actual data on a computer screen, before I give this any credence.
Obviously mental disorders exist. Just like anything it is related to our genetics and our environment and our choices...I would need to see alot of evidence before I believe TFA's assertions to the heritability.
Examine this list of behavior (copied from wikipedia which quotes the DSM):
According to the revised fourth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-IV-TR), to be diagnosed with schizophrenia, three diagnostic criteria must be met:[10]
Characteristic symptoms: Two or more of the following, each present for much of the time during a one-month period (or less, if symptoms remitted with treatment).
- Delusions
- Hallucinations
- Disorganized speech, which is a manifestation of formal thought disorder
- Grossly disorganized behavior (e.g. dressing inappropriately, crying frequently) or catatonic behavior
- Negative symptoms: Blunted affect (lack or decline in emotional response), alogia (lack or decline in speech), or avolition (lack or decline in motivation)
If the delusions are judged to be bizarre, or hallucinations consist of hearing one voice participating in a running commentary of the patient's actions or of hearing two or more voices conversing with each other, only that symptom is required above. The speech disorganization criterion is only met if it is severe enough to substantially impair communication.
- Social or occupational dysfunction: For a significant portion of the time since the onset of the disturbance, one or more major areas of functioning such as work, interpersonal relations, or self-care, are markedly below the level achieved prior to the onset.
- Significant duration: Continuous signs of the disturbance persist for at least six months. This six-month period must include at least one month of symptoms (or less, if symptoms remitted with treatment).
I want to say that if you talk to a "good" psychiatrist or psychologist they will be able to explain how *they* personally in practice diagnose these different disorders and it may make sense. Furthermore, I'm convince psychology is a great area for scientific investigation.
All that said, as I look at that list of behaviors, then I look at the data as presented, I can only conclude that "schizophrenia" is *probably* an obsolete distinction and this data is being erroneously interpreted.
Thank you Dave Raggett
From the people I've known with schizophrenia (three diagnosed, a couple others probably undiagnosed) the audio hallucinations can either be recognized as hallucinations, or accepted as real, depending on the severity of the disorder at the time. If they are in a less severe mode they usually recognize the voices are not real (not to imply they can stop or control them). The recorder would do no good there. In more severe conditions, they may be unable to tell the difference between the hallucinations and reality, and the hallucinations can be not just auditory but also visual and (most importantly) cognitive. With cognitive delusions, reasoning capacity goes out the window - any kind of "evidence" presented to them would be disregarded. In the really bad cases, when they are ducking out of view of windows so the snipers outside can't get a clear shot, you won't be able to get them to look at any computer program really.
Probably at least a few of those sub-disorders are actually nutritional deficiencies. We have this myth (perpetuated by MDs who have ZERO training in nutrition) that we don't have nutritional deficiencies in America. In fact, the American diet is horrible, and we all know it. B12 deficiencies are common (which is one of the reasons shots are often prescribed), as are deficiencies in magnesium, along with numerous other vitamins and minerals. Since the mid 90's, the FDA has mandated "enrichment" of foods, but the forms of the additives are NOT the biologically active forms, so some people have trouble processing them. For instance, MTHFR gene defects are common (my wife and I have different ones, and she has the really bad C677T defect), making folic acid (which is artificial) range from useless to poisonous to some people who need to take methylfolate instead. In fact, since the mid 90's a lot of people have reported declines in their health, which may be correlated with that FDA mandate (although without a more complete study, we have to assume this is anecdotal and COULD be correlated more strongly with something else).
Anyhow, my point is that many psychological disorders, such as bipolarism, are associated with vitamin deficiencies. If you look at the symptoms lists of various B vitamin deficiencies, for instance, you'll see that it is already established what kinds of psychological effects can occur in cases of "extreme" deficiencies. If we can get past the idea that nobody in America can have extreme vitamin deficiencies (you can have plenty of some vitamin but still be anemic if you can't USE it in that form), then we can start treating mental disorders using carefully controlled diets and supplement schedules. I'm sure it won't work on everyone, but it would be insane to not try it in place of loading people up on antipsychotics because the "doctors" are mental hospitals have no fucking clue about nutrition.
And just to reinforce, folic acid is basically poison to about 10% of humans. Different vegetables contain methylfolate and/or folinic acid, NOT folic acid. Defects in the genes that code enzymes that convert folinic acid and folic acid are more common than most food allergies, making this a serious problem!
One interesting side-effect of this is the proliferation of the bad genes. People with homozygous C677T mutation have about a 30% conversion rate from folic acid to methylfolate. (Meanwhile the unconverted folic acid itself interferes with the methylation cycle.) If a woman gets pregnant and takes folic acid in large quantities (which is what doctors instruct), the fetus will take all of the methylfolate, and the mother will get very sick. Meanwhile the fetus will be allowed to develop when otherwise it would have naturally aborted due to an inability on its own to convert folinic acid that you get from food. As a result, we have more people born with this defect, while people in the FDA and the medical profession are too ignorant of the consequences to deal with them properly. Mind you, if they were to take more methylfolate, the viability of this defect would increase, but at least the mothers wouldn't get as sick.