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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."
that schizophrenia itself has a bit of a split personality.
well, when i say 'I', its more of a consensus decision.
AKA Dissociative identity disorder. There is a slight comorbidity between the conditions, but depression and anxiety are also comorbid.
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.
Helps explain why my dog reacts differently to different people with the diagnosis of schizophrenia. Some he's very friendly with, others he makes it abundantly clear that he wants nothing to do with them - or with them being around me.
Dogs can sense a lot of things we miss - maybe they can pick up something about the dangerous ones that we can't. And yes, one of the ones he kept growling at eventually went looking for a gun. Told my neighbor (who has 3 registered hand guns) that he hated my guts and where could he buy a gun? Stopped a few weeks later after dusk walking around with a holster with what appeared, in the dark, to be a gun. Knees on the ground, hands in the air, the whole bit. Apparently he wasn't happy that I had reported him to Youth Protection for moving back to the neighborhood after he had assured the court he wouldn't be having any more contact with a kid living in the next building.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Next this needs to be done with what we call "autism". There's a reason it's called the "autistic spectrum"; it's a MUCH bigger but nebulous target than schizophrenia. There's so much symptomatic comorbidity that the diagnoses would be funny if the consequences weren't so depressing.
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.
Well - no, and no. Recall that schizophrenia is a perception-of-reality disorder and has almost nothing to do with dissociative identity (a.k.a. multiple personality) disorder
Are you joking? "Eugenics" comes from Greek. 'Eu' meaning good, like euphoria, euphemism, or utopia. 'Genic', dealing with birth, breeding, and production, like in genetics, generate, or hydrogen.
Please stop repeating something like it is new. Since its origins the concept is called "the schizophrenias". We knew that 100 years before now: http://schizophreniabulletin.o...
La culpa no es del chancho...
When you don't need to prove anything ... and it only needs to be "evidence based" ... a diagnosis can change as frequently as insurance billing requirements.
We should learn what we need to know about issues, before we decide what we need to feel about them.
I'd expect most people to interpret "eugenics" as the Greek stems for "good" and "genes", because that's where the word comes from. A fairly obscure nazzy doktor with a similar name isn't what tainted the word.
I'd expect most people neither to associate it with the Greek stems in question nor with Eugen Fischer; I'd expect them to have no clue where the word came from.
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
Bipolar Disorder, Psychosis and Schizophrenia for Dummies who know a little physics etc.
Life is generally in a good position when it has potential (like gravitational potential in the case of high ground) and the capacity to use it in a controlled fashion. That means balancing in a position that would otherwise be considered an unstable equilibrium in the sense of dynamical systems theory. Our bodies are at their most efficient when well balanced (just watch a good dancer to see this in action) and our brains are at their best when similarly balanced. If something disturbs the equilibrium, this disturbance and the required correction can be used to understand the disturbance. This is how stimulation affects us.
Now consider a simple example of a balancing physical object, but with no control mechanism: a spinning top. This has three states--spinning upright (when the gravitational potential is near its maximum), wobbling (when the gravitational potential is slightly lower, in which case it behaves erratically and gives up its energy randomly until...) finally we have the fallen over state. This is what medical people term depression. The simple solution is to get upright and balanced again, but this is hard in our modern overly complex society, and the result of trying to get up is often a lot of wobbling, which gets diagnosed as things like mania, psychosis and schizophrenia depending on how exactly this wobbling manifests itself. The key is to get balanced before you get pushed over, and that is hard when the medical mental health people seem to have the idea that you fix a wobbling spinning top by knocking it over and gluing it to the floor.
Trying to understand mental health in a 'sum of the parts' way is just dumb, but it is the obsession of the medical fraternity, and is to the extent that it is politically very difficult to suggest otherwise. How our genetic code creates us is an approach that misses the point that without the environmental context in which that genetic code develops, it won't develop, so you need to understand the environment as well (and that means understanding the entire world in complete detail, which is rather a long way the other side of impossible).
Viewed as an equilbrium seeking system, 'mental illnesses' like mania and schizophrenia are just seen as things like oscillations and resonant modes that are being excited by either an appropriate drive, or are resonating within the equilibrium seeking system. The biological stuff is just an implementation detail in much the way that transistors on a chip are implementation details of your python program that you are running that you can safely ignore in most cases. Medication is basically trying to solve a software problem by randomly pumping noise into the processor. A computer will crash instantly if you do this, but humans are rather more robust, and can survive for a long time in an unbalanced state. They are, however, rather unproductive in this state and won't tend to find life enjoyable. But they can survive for a long time, but can become desperate to get out of such states.
John_Chalisque