We Might Be Treating Schizophrenia All Wrong

[Jilly_in_VA]

For more than 70 years, doctors treated the symptoms of schizophrenia—delusions, hallucinations, cognitive impairments—with antipsychotic medications. Prevailing theories suggest that elevated dopamine signaling in the brain leads to schizophrenia, so these antipsychotics provide relief by tempering dopamine activity. Yet, it has never been entirely clear how these drugs quiet dopamine activity. And due to their nature, these drugs impact other parts of the body and foster unwanted side effects including weight gain, constipation, and drowsiness. On top of that, more than nearly a third of patients don’t even respond to two or more common antipsychotic treatments.

What if there was a better way to treat the more than 24 million people around the world with schizophrenia? A new study run by researchers in Japan and published earlier this year in Cell Reports Medicine suggests that for at least a significant portion of patients, the immune system is mistakenly attacking a protein in the brain—which may be the real mechanism giving rise to schizophrenic symptoms in the first place.

This study is the tip of the iceberg too.

“We don’t know what causes schizophrenia,” Roger McIntyre, psychiatrist and professor of psychiatry and pharmacology at the University of Toronto (who was unaffiliated with this work), told The Daily Beast. “Rigorous scientific studies that have been conducted and they have concluded that for some people, some of the symptoms of schizophrenia may be a consequence of a disturbance in the immune inflammatory system.”

This in turn, may open the door to an entirely new way of treating schizophrenia—one that’s unencumbered by the challenges holding back current antipsychotics.

The team behind the new study analyzed blood from about 200 patients with schizophrenia and compared it to blood samples from more than 200 healthy individuals. In about 6 percent of schizophrenia patients, the researchers found elevated levels of an antibody that targeted NCAM1, a protein crucial for cell communication in the brain. None of the healthy individuals enrolled in the study produced this antibody.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/we-might-be-treating-schizophrenia-all-wrong?ref=home

Holy crap, if this is true, so many lives could be saved!

[SheltieLover]

1. Wow!

[maxsolomon]

2. Please solve this riddle fast.

The untreated Schizophrenics on my city's streets are legion. It's tragic and appalling.

[arlyellowdog]

3. I'll bet this applies to types of autism

I have no idea why my 45 year old son has severe autism, but the best doctors have always said it’s probably got to do with proteins or enzymes.

[pnwmom]

9. There are higher rates of gluten sensitivity among autistic people,

so that could be a clue.

[NullTuples]

13. Autism was only listed under Schizophrenia b/c neither gave doctors sufficient recognition

Researchers until the mid-1990's when brain imaging and other neurological tools became available lumped them together because they - the researchers - were not receiving the social feedback they needed from their subjects/patients and so put them in the same category. Doctors & researchers now realize that if they want to learn about autistics, they have to treat us as different but equal. Sort of like learning about a different culture but one that is inherent & intrinsic rather than learned.

While Schizophrenia has long been recognized as largely chemical, autism is simply a different neurology. We take in information differently, process it differently, and communicate it out differently. There's nothing to "cure", which is why attempts have done little but induce trauma. ABA for instance, can train someone to appear to act "normal" but at the cost of a great deal of exhaustion, stress, repression, and trauma. And even then there's always a point where it breaks down & fails. Some side traits of autism do seem likely to have chemical components, such as synesthesia and sensory thresholds, but the chemical component also only seems to be a moderator, not a root cause, which is the case for allistics, too (allistics are non-autistics).

[Jilly_in_VA]

21. I would not assume

that all autistics are the same either, just from raising my ASD son. Too many have different traits. That "NOS" makes it an umbrella designation. I can point to specific incidents in his early years, mainly involving illnesses, after which he experienced significant setbacks in development many of which took a very long time to reverse. Many seem to have severe gut issues also. You can't speak for all autistic people even if you are one.

[NullTuples]

25. Many autistics have "gut issues", but many are also EDS. Or trans. Or...

The point is, you are speaking for autistics when you are not one *and* you are conflating medical conditions and intellectual or other disabilities with a fairly distinct neurology.

[Jilly_in_VA]

27. And you are speaking

for ALL autistics, which is also not right, even if you are one.

[NullTuples]

28. No, I'm speaking narrowly about neurodiversity & one particular type of neurology.

[intrepidity]

4. It seems there's barely a disease that isn't linked to inflammation

I hope several teams aggressively follow-up this lead.

[Rebl2]

19. Seems like it

[Fiendish Thingy]

5. Intriguing, but far from conclusive at this time

Hopefully further study will unlock the key

[rurallib]

6. That is why we love science - they never quit seeking answers

and when a new answer proves to be the right answer there is n hesitation to adapt it after testing.

Better than just saying someone is evil and stoning them.

As someone noted above, inflammation seems to be at the base of many human problems.

[Rural_Progressive]

20. Not sure what institute of higher learning you've been affiliated with

but the one I went to did not really work that way.

People are people and particularly as they get older it becomes difficult to watch something you spent a lifetime investigating, validating, and receiving recognition for get tossed into the waste bin of history.

I watched several professors have to let go of their favored findings in the face of new information. They did not do this with grace and dignity.

The system has its flaws, the people working in the system have their flaws but as you pointed out it sure beats public stonings to decide issues

[NNadir]

7. It's a very small sample size.

At best this is a very preliminary result.

[Ferrets are Cool]

8. IF we are around in 100 years, our ways of treating diseases now will be considered

medieval at best, torture at worst.
Case in point, wifeys life was saved by massive doses of chemo. Now she has Leukemia, which was caused by "massive doses of chemo".

[spike jones]

10. Turmeric n/t

[bucolic_frolic]

15. There is this widespread evidence emerging, not fully tabulated or recognized yet

that most disease has some connection to the liver, inflammation, and thus to the gall bladder and pancreas, and most of it is caused by the modern diet. Now I'm sure there were schizophrenic patients before the diet began to change about 1870, but I have no statistics to see if there are more such today.

[C Moon]

18. My brother's son is bi-polar, and my niece (on my wife's side) is bi-polar, also

our next door neighbor's grandson is bi-polar.
Maybe it's a coincidence, but it certainly seems to be out of control.

[WinstonSmith4740]

11. And in the same vein...

https://www.alzheimers.net/2014-04-07-beta-amyloid-wrong-protein

[applegrove]

12. Hope this leads to a cure for those poor souls who suffer from it.

[mopinko]

22. who knew it wasnt all mom's fault?

none of the docs that treated 2 of my kids.

[applegrove]

23. Aw. That is so awful.

[bucolic_frolic]

14. Gee the psychologists were all wrong, who could have guessed?

[iemanja]

29. Psychiatrists

Psychologists deal with therapy, not medication and not the causes of schizophrenia.

[Thunderbeast]

16. There is a known connection between mental illness and gut chemistry

There is WAY MORE to learn.

The return on investment in mental health research would be huge!

I am a supporter of this organization:

https://www.bbrfoundation.org/

[ShazzieB]

17. Whoa. This could be a major paradigm shift.

It's only been since the 1950s that doctors could anything at all for schizophrenics. That's when the antipsychotic medications came into use. Schizophrenia was untreatable for all of human history up to that point. And now, a scant 70 years later, we could be on the edge of another, possibly even bigger, breakthrough. That takes my breath away! I'm going to be very interested to see how this turns out!

[duckworth969]

24. Schizophrenia and the perception of time

Many years ago I read a study that hypothesized that those with schizophrenia are not experiencing the same chronology as those who are around them.

It’s not that they’re “sick” or something is “wrong with them”.

It’s just they are not in the same present moment as everyone else.

It is posited that those with schizophrenia experience time differently because of the way their brains are wired.

Because they are neurologically unable to remain in the present, they jump back and forth to different points in their life experience.

Any person who was wired in that way would seem to be out of sync with what is happening in real-time. And hence, the appearance that something is “not quite right” with that person.

Compounding matters, think of all the things you do in your own present moment besides being wholly present.

We fantasize, we daydream, we lose focus, etc.

Consider then, you jump to a point in time in your past life experience where you are daydreaming during that life experience.

It’s enough to make your head spin.

But you ARE really there in that moment in real-time.

Because you are unable to remain in the present, your brain keeps leapfrogging from one time to the next.

Understandably, to those around you, your behavior would seem incomprehensible and unsettling.

Fairly certain I came across that study when I was reading a book by Antonio Damasio concerning his efforts on finding a specific area of the brain in his search for the seat of consciousness.

[live love laugh]

26. 6 percent is a low number. Seems inconclusive.