In “Schizophrenia takes a daughter away: Even a loving family with ample financial resources is powerless against the disease,” Scott Gold and Lee Romney of the Los Angeles (CA, US) Times describe the struggles of Tiffany Sitton and her family with Ms. Sitton’s schizophrenia. The reporters reveal how shortcomings in the mental health system have put Ms. Sitton and her parents in untenable positions.
Continue reading ‘Schizophrenia robs family’
Archive for the 'Schizophrenia' Category
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Stephen Smith and colleagues have discovered why mothers who have been exposed to infectious agents during pregnancy produce offspring that have abnormalities in behavior, histology, and gene expression similar to what is seen in schizophrenia and autism. Working with rodents in the lab of Paul Patterson at California Institute of Technology (Pasadena, CA, US), Mr. Smith and his colleagues showed that interleukin-6 is at least partially responsible for mediating the behavioral and genetic changes in the offspring.
A team of California Institute of Technology researchers has found an unexpected link connecting schizophrenia and autism to the importance of covering your mouth whenever you sneeze.
It has been known for some time that schizophrenia is more common among people born in the winter and spring months, as well as in people born following influenza epidemics. Recent studies suggest that if a woman suffers even one respiratory infection during her second trimester, her offspring’s risk of schizophrenia rises by three to seven times.
Since schizophrenia and autism have a strong (though elusive) genetic component, there is no absolute certainty that infection will cause the disorders in a given case, but it is believed that as many as 21 percent of known cases of schizophrenia may have been triggered in this way. The conclusion is that susceptibility to these disorders is increased by something that occurs to mother or fetus during a bout with the flu.
Now, researchers have isolated a protein that plays a pivotal role in that dire chain of events.
Link to the public abstract of the study from the Journal of Neuroscience. PhysOrg.com coverage quoted here.
Sphere: Related ContentNARSAD: The Mental Health Research Association announced its grants for 2007, including 23 Distinguished Investigators and 222 Young Investigators. The awards represent more than $15 million in grants, and many of them are relevant to Emotional and Behavioral Disorders among children and youths.
Continue reading ‘NARSAD 2007′
Roni Rabin reports that older males may be contributing to the incidence of disorders such as Autism and schizophrenia. Writing in the New York (NY, US) Times on 27 February 2007 under the headline “It Seems the Fertility Clock Ticks for Men, Too,” Ms. Rabin covers some of the same evidence Leslie Feldman covered here for EBD Blog. This is Ms. Rabin’s lead:
Continue reading ‘NYT on paternal age’
Last September I reported on a study indicating that older fathers were more likely than their younger peers to have children who have autism. The story elicited comments about the potential importance of this matter. Since then, I’ve corresponded with Leslie Feldman, who left comments on this and other posts about the topic. Ms. Feldman sent me a document that discusses the relationship between paternal age and the chances of offsrping having autism or schizophrenia.
Despite my sloth, I finally managed to review and format Ms. Feldman’s observations, and I am glad to make them available to readers of EBD Blog as a Web page. Ms. Feldman’s document is entitled, “Fathers’ Age as Contributor to Risk for Autism.” Interested readers may view the document, including references and links to many resources on this topic, by following this link or by clicking on the page in the side rail (look under the heading “pages”).
My thanks to Ms. Feldman for her patience with me in the process of publishing this document and, more importantly, for taking the time to assemble this important content so that it can be communicated to the readers of EBD Blog.
Sphere: Related ContentOn the blog over at Psych Central under the title “Scanning for Schizophrenia,” Sandra Kiume has a post about developments in prediction of schizophrenia. Genetic risk in combination with MRI scans is increasing the accuracy of predictions, according to Ms. Kiume’s reading of data from the Edinburgh High Risk Study. Link Ms. Kiume’s entry.
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