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High heels cause schizophrenia!

MALMO (SWEDEN): The well-heeled might have cause for alarm. A scientist in Sweden says wearing high heels can lead to mental disorders, and has drawn alarming parallels between stilettos and schizophrenia among women.

Jarl Flensmark says high heels cause their wearers to tense their calves in a way that normal walking never does. That could prevent neuro-receptors in the calf muscles from triggering release of dopamine, a compound necessary for mental well-being.

See the whole article from The Guardian here

Hidden significance of a man's ring finger

Scientists at The University of Liverpool have found a link between finger length and depression in men: the longer a man's fingers are relative to his height, the more likely he is to suffer from depression. Ironically, perhaps, the strongest single indicator is the relative length of his ring finger.

See whole article here (PDF doc.)

Scientists breed world’s first mentally ill mouse

The Sunday Times July 29, 2007

SCIENTISTS have created the world’s first schizophrenic mice in an attempt to gain a better understanding of the illness.

It is believed to be the first time an animal has been genetically engineered to have a mental illness. Until now they have been bred only for research into physical conditions such as heart disease. It will allow researchers to study the disease and develop treatments using a limitless supply of laboratory animals

Animal rights campaigners have condemned the research, saying that it is morally repugnant to create an animal doomed to mental suffering.

The mice were created by modifying their DNA to mimic a mutant gene first found in a Scottish family with a high incidence of schizophrenia, which affects about one in every 100 people. The mice’s brains were found to have features similar to those of humans with schizophrenia, such as depression and hyperactivity.

“These mutant mice may provide an important new tool for further study of the combinations of factors that underlie mental illnesses like schizophrenia and mood disorders,” said Takatoshi Hikida, of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, a leading researcher.

The egg cells of mice were genetically modified by inserting a gene associated with schizophrenia into their DNA. The eggs were fertilised and grown into viable baby mice using surrogate mothers.

Animal Aid, a campaign group, said rodents were not a reliable way of modelling human disease

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article2159295.ece

Can cats cause schizophrenia?

December 7, 2000 issue of The Times--  It told of two American scientists who have the idea that a virus in cat droppings may cause schizophrenia.
These men plan to use a common drug to test their cat-poop concept on some people with schizophrenia. The results aren't in yet, but here's how the thinking goes:

In everyone's DNA are things called "endogenous retroviruses." They're throwbacks to infections our ancestors had and are normally harmless. But if they're activated, they slowly mess up an area of the brain known as the hippocampus.  The damage doesn't show up until the brain stops growing in adolescence and it's between then and age 30 when most schizophrenia develops.

What triggers this destructive retrovirus? Psychiatrist Fuller Torrey and virologist Robert Yolken believe the culprit is something called toxoplasmosis. That's a parasite found in the faeces of about 1 percent of house cats.
This bug is killed by most people's immune systems before it causes the disease toxoplasmosis. But a pregnant woman with the parasite can transmit it to her foetus. And here's where it gets interesting.  As the resulting baby grows into an adult, the parasite supposedly hides dormant in the person's brain. Then sometime between age 15 and 30, the toxoplasma comes alive, triggers the retrovirus and schizophrenia develops.

This all seemed a bit off-the-wall when Torrey and Yolken first proposed it in 1995. Especially since their hypothesis derived from the following, rather thin evidence: -- One study found that 51 percent of schizophrenics had cats at home when they were kids, compared to only 38 percent of the control group.

-- Then research found that schizophrenics are more likely to have been born in late winter or early spring. So what? That's when cats stay inside more, using their litter boxes.  (See also flu virus causes schizophrenia)
-- They noted that schizophrenia was relatively rare in Europe until the late 19th century. And that's when cats became popular as pets.
"Initially, this seemed daft," says The Times article. Then along came a 1999 study of 53,000 frozen blood samples. They were taken from pregnant women during the 1950s as part of an anti-polio campaign.
A Harvard researcher tracked down a lot of these women's kids, and singled out about 100 children who developed schizophrenia after childhood.
He found that their mothers had antibodies to toxoplasmosis at a rate 4.5 times greater than in the other mothers and the rate was 7.5 times greater for antibodies to the sexually-transmitted viral disease called herpes simplex t2.

So now Torrey and Yolken plan to treat one test group of schizophrenics with an antibiotic that kills toxoplasma, and another group with an anti-viral drug used against the herpes virus.

Why is this important? The Times article says "if it's possible to identify the viruses involved and discover what makes them become so destructive, doctors may be able to treat schizophrenia with anti-viral drugs ... or immune boosters."

For further info see Mihms article/interview with Fuller Torrey


http://cogweb.ucla.edu/ep/Schizovirus.html

Danes want to create schizophrenic pigs?

Danes want to make schizophrenic pigs (06/21/01)
Schizophrenic pigs? Yes, at least if scientists at a psychiatric unit at Bispebjerg Hospital in Denmark gets it their way. They mean pigs' brains are big enough to give appropriate results on brain scans. They also say pigs have a well developed social hierarchy, which it is thought to be very helpful, since schizophrenics often have problems with their social behaviour. They hope the experiments with the schizophrenic pigs will help them understand how schizophrenia works in humans, so they can develop methods to prevent the disease.

http://www.hubin.org/media/artiklar/index_en.html#schizopigs