From: CurtAdams@aol.com, Sat, 9 Sep 2000
>That schizophrenia strikes overwhelmingly during a relatively short window in
>late teens/early twenties is interesting.
Right. In the U.S., three-quarters of those who get schizophrenia do
so between the ages of 17 and 25. Having an initial onset before age
14, or after age 30 is unusual.
>Is there a temporally programmed
>brain change which goes to excess in such people? Possibly the onset
>period for schizophrenia might provides clues on how and why the brain
>changes function during life.
I don't think the reasons are known yet. When the reasons are known,
then that would also be clues for the age onset of other brain
diseases such as multiple sclerosis and Alzheimer's.
There are also gender differences between men and women who get
schizophrenia. For men, the age of onset is earlier (2 to 3 years
earlier), and in men, the disease is usually more serious than for
women. The reasons for the gender differences are unknown too.
>>His years from age ~60 show his
>>illness in a dramatic remission and his colleagues call him "recovered".
>>He is perhaps, one of the rare schizophrenic cases that goes into
>>remission.
>
>Not that rare, actually; schizophrenia often abates with age.
Yes, that's right. I had forgotten about that.
>One theory is that schizophrenia results from hyperactivity in certain
>dopamine systems. The dopamine systems deteriorate with age, and so
>some of these patients become more normal again.
Seems reasonable. A portion of the limbic system is suspected of
being involved in schizophrenia, and I read that there is an
excessive number of dopamine receptors found in the limbic system
and basal ganglia in brains from patients with schizophrenia
compared with control brains (and this finding factored out the
antipsychotic medications the patients had been taking)
A fellow doing a lot of research with brains in order to learn of
the causes of schizophrenia is E.Fuller Torrey. He has written a
book: _Surviving Schizophrenia: A Family Manual_, that is the best
book I've yet seen on the topic.
Excerpts from _Surviving Schizophrenia_ book can be found here:
http://www.mentalhealth.com/book/p40-sc03.html
Torrey is a really interesting schizophrenia researcher, so I'll
spend a moment talking about him.
He studied medicine early in his career, but his sister's strange
behavior (who was eventually diagnosed as schizophrenic) shifted his
studies into the psychiatric field. The theories for schizophrenia
at that time made no sense to him. He fought against his psychiatric
profession, quit the American Psychiatric Association and never
rejoined. As an adminstrator at the National Institute of Mental
Health in the 1970's, he criticized his peers for flocking into
lucrative private practices to serve the "worried well, " proposing
that psychiatrists either spend two years working in underserved
areas or repay the money that the Government had invested in their
training. The advance of MRIs and a fresh generation of
neuroscientists in the 1980s supported his ideas that schizophrenia
was a brain disease, and he became an vocal advocate of the National
Alliance for the Mentally Ill. He first published _Surviving
Schizophrenia_ in 1983, and the latest (third) edition was published
in 1995. He specializes now in schizophrenia both as a
clinical and as a research psychiatrist in Washington, D.C.
He's had a varied career. He did his training in psychiatry at
Stanford University, where he also took a master's degree in
anthropology. He practiced general medicine and psychiatry; he
served as a physician with the Peace Corps in Ethiopia, spent a year
in a neighborhood clinic in the South Bronx, New York, and in Alaska
in the Indian Health Service. Included in his work in psychiatry, he
had four years as a Special Assistant to the Director of the
National Institute of Mental Health, affiliation with St.
Elizabeth's Hospital in Washington, D.C., and field research in
schizophrenia in Papua New Guinea, and in Ireland. He is the author
of nine books, over 100 lay and professional papers, and serves as
contributing editor to Psychology Today.
In 1989, a weathy couple (the Stanleys) in Connecticut who have a
schizophrenic family member, and were impressed by his book
_Surviving Schizophrenia_, started donating money yearly to mental
illness research and to aid Torrey in his efforts. In the nice web
article that I read about Torrey,
http://www.schizophrenia.com/newsletter/398/398torrey.htm
I read that the Stanleys gave out $20 million on that year (1998).
Torrey estimates that that couple will spend more on manic
depression research than the U.S. Federal Government and about a
fifth of what the Government spends on schizophrenia research.
Torrey's most ambitious project though, now is a brain bank.
I like this quote by Torrey:
"The disease in in the brain! We need brains!"
>From the above URL:
"We won't be getting any brains in the mail today, " the
nation's best-known schizophrenia researcher says as he
hurries to a meeting at his Washington laboratory. "They
don't mail them over the weekend. We'll probably get some
fresh brains Fed Exed tomorrow. " Dr. E. Fuller Torrey, a
psychiatrist, has had many grand passions during his
three-decade crusade to cure schizophrenia, but none greater
than his new human brain bank. For years, a major obstacle
for scientists researching the neurological roots of serious
mental illnesses -- schizophrenia, manic depression,
depression -- has been the lack of first-rate human brains
to study. "The only schizophrenic brains available have been
very old and not in very good shape, " Torrey says. They
came from state hospitals and nursing homes, from patients
so elderly that by the time they died the brain had
atrophied. "We wanted to be in position to get better
brains, brains of people younger and not dead long. " Brains
that would be full of unaltered proteins and
neurotransmitters, viruses and cytokines that might hold the
answers to schizophrenia's cause.
The brain bank is central to his grand plan. In 1994, he
began contacting medical examiners' offices and has since
built a national network that collects brains of mentally
ill people who died in their 20's, 30's and 40's, from
suicide and heart failure, in car crashes and fires. Torrey
has employed a half-dozen pathologists around the country,
paying them as much as $100,000 a year, to work full-time
hunting brains. Within 48 hours of death, the brain is
frozen at minus-70 degrees and shipped to Torrey. "We're up
to 226 brains, " Torrey says. "We have 44 freezers here just
full of brain. " While Torrey uses some tissue samples
himself, most are distributed free to researchers worldwide.
"Scientists historically have not shared their sources, "
says Dr. Stanley J. Watson, a University of Michigan
professor who leased a truck in December to pick up 20,000
brain sections from Torrey's lab. "His attitude has been,
the more horsepower, the faster we can all move ahead. "
Another interesting article on E. Fuller Torrey's research:
http://www.psychlaws.org/General%20Resources/Article5.htm
Torrey is currently working now on a viral theory to explain
schizophrenia.
There is a general consensus that genetics plays some role in the
disease (if one has a parent who is schizophrenic, then the
probability of getting the disease is ~10%, if one's grandparent is
schizophrenic, the odds are ~4%, if both parents are schizophrenic,
the statistics show about 45% probability, and the general
population has about a 1% probability of getting the disease), and
genetic theories of schizophrenia fit comfortably with the facts
known about the disease. The major criticism of genetic theories is
that schizophrenics themselves have a very low rate of
reporoduction, and one would think that schizophrenia should have
died out or at least become less prevalent, if it is transmitted
from affected individuals to their offspring.
Viral theories also fit the facts known about schizophrenia. They
can explain the minor physical anomalies, the microspic and CT-scan
changes in the brains, the seasonality of births, and the involvment
of the limbic system since several viruses have an affinity for that
part of the brain. The fact that schizophrenia runs in families can
be explained either by a gentic predisposition to the virus, by
transmission of a virus on the gene itself, or by transmission of
the virus acros the placenta from the mother (or the father, via the
semen) during pregnancy. Some viruses have also been shown to cause
changes in neurotransmitters, such as dopamine in the brain.
But there are other plausible causes of schizophrenia as well
(immunological theories, developmental theories, stress theories,
nutritional theories, biochemical theories), and Torrey's book
describes these in some detail.
Amara
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Amara Graps email: amara@amara.com
Computational Physics vita: finger agraps@shell5.ba.best.com
Multiplex Answers URL: http://www.amara.com/
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"Sometimes I think I understand everything. Then I regain
consciousness." --Ashleigh Brilliant
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