Schizophrenia may be linked to immune system., page 1

I think I have heard rumors of this before, but the theory is that the mother's immune system may be attacking the baby's brain in utero, causing this mental disorder. Either that, the immune system is attacking the sufferer's body, but since the brain is so delicate, symptoms show up first in in mental illness, then as health issues. People who suffer mental health conditions such a bipolar, depression, and sch... tend to report pain issues. Much like fibromyalgia or arthritis. So it makes sense that it could be an immune issue.

Mental health is a serious problem that has a great stigma, is under studied and lacks critical attention. It is an awful thing for the sufferers and their families to deal with. And millions of Americans suffer from it.

But it does seem they are looking, and there is hope......


schizophrenia may be linked...

reply to post by nixie_nox

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Very interesting nixie nox.

I believe that Schizophrenia is also linked with an impaired sense of smell.

It would interesting to know if this damage also happens in the womb , as a result of the same infection during pregnancy.

It's surprising to find that mental health researchers have, on the whole, tended to imagine mental disease as a primarily brain-centric class of illness. When the physical body is examined at all (as opposed to pure evaluation of reported symptoms and social response), that effort has been put toward establishing observable anomalies within the brain itself (through CT, MRI, etc.) as a path toward first validating a suspected illness, and eventually understanding and treating it. Examining the rest of the body for anomalies has been neglected as a matter of standard. Physical symptoms among mental health patients have been traditionally brushed aside as psychosomatic--as mere indications of a patient's abnormal mindset, or simply ignored.

What we are instead finding is that mental disorders do frequently show connections to verifiable physical illnesses, beyond the obvious hormonal disorders. As we see with the OP, autoimmune disorders in particular show a high probability of connection to schizophrenia, and perhaps other mental disorders. Celiac disease, Lyme disease and Lupus come immediately to mind as diseases affecting the entire body, with a high frequency of neurological symptoms such as depression, anxiety, and hallucinations (as seen with schizophrenia, among others). As an interesting example, patients with Lyme disease are sometimes misdiagnosed with schizophrenia or related disorders before later laboratory tests confirm presence of Lyme. I'm afraid to imagine how often this is the case with assumed mental disorders and their often physical (e.g. viral, bacterial, genetic) causes.

There is a profound and greatly harmful disconnect between the mental health profession and the rest of the medical community, which stifles advancement toward evaluating psychological symptoms as indicators of potential physical abnormalities. Rather than assuming that a depressed or anxious individual is simply in need of Prozac or Effexor, or any other oft-prescribed psychiatric drug (as many mental health professionals do), it is imperative that the entire body be evaluated.

The two aspects--the brain and the rest of the body--are so deeply and, one would think, obviously connected. Yet the medical community has somehow failed to focus their attention toward this fact. They've missed the boat for decades, to the detriment of thousands of patients. Perhaps soon we can begin to focus greater effort toward understanding these disorders and their potential relation to immunity, genes, nerve function, etc. and eventually establish more effective treatments.

Here is a summary of a related Danish study published a few years ago: Link Between Schizophrenia and Autoimmune Disease. The results support those found at your source, nixie_nox.

Thanks for creating this thread .

When i worked as a EMT i found a larger then normal number of schizophrenics that were also type 2 diabetics. and a number of them were not overweight,

Or were these people Latent Autoimmune Diabetes in Adults (LADA)
www.isletsofhope.com...

But there were none that i remember that were type 1 diabetics???????

And many times there blood sugar levels would be high 300 to 400 ml/dl

www.springerlink.com...
www.medindia.net...
bjp.rcpsych.org...

[edit on 4-7-2009 by ANNED]

[edit on 4-7-2009 by ANNED]

reply to post by paperplanes

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I wish I could give you more then a star. Very well said, and great points. Thank you very much.

reply to post by UmbraSumus

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How did you come to that conclusion? That is interesting. I have a lot of bipolar sufferers in my life, and they seem to have a hyper sensitivities, though it may be different with sch.....

Originally posted by nixie_nox
in reply post

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How did you come to that conclusion? That is interesting. I have a lot of bipolar sufferers in my life, and they seem to have a hyper sensitivities, though it may be different with sch.....

The study which identified a link between schizophrenia and problems with olfaction was conducted by Australian psychiatrists,who now believe it may prove a valuable tool in predicting the onset of the psychiatric disorder.

Warrick Brewer, a psychiatrist from the University of Melbourne in Australia, and colleagues compared the olfactory abilities of a group of 81 high-risk patients against those of 31 volunteers in a control group.

The at-risk group were recruited from a university sponsored clinic that monitors teens who appear to be developing a serious mental illness, yet have not yet had any psychotic episodes. After 18 months, 22 of the high-risk patients suffered psychotic episodes and 12 were found to be schizophrenic.

Psychology Today

I believe that the sense of smell is unique in that it is experienced in a more direct manner than the other four senses .

It is first important to understand the physiology of olfaction. The primary olfactory cortex, in which higher-level processing of olfactory information takes place, forms a direct link with the amygdala and the hippocampus.

Only two synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the amygdala, which is involved in experiencing emotion and also in emotional memory (Herz & Engen, 1996). In addition, only three synapses separate the olfactory nerve from the hippocampus, which is implicated in memory, especially working memory and short-term memory.

Olfaction is the sensory modality that is physically closest to the limbic system, of which the hippocampus and amygdala are a part, and which is responsible for emotions and memory. Indeed this may be why odor-evoked memories are unusually emotionally potent (1996).

source

If people were given the choice of which of the five senses they had to lose , they would probably choose the sense of smell . But it conveys a lot of information to us , which we are often unaware of, its subconscious influence- pervasive . We as modern
humans are still built( literally) around a more primitive brain . A lot of our mental hardware has been in place before we became conscious (or experienced greater consciousness) , ...... so much of what we are remains hidden to us .
Quite spooky when you think about it .

So it may very well be, that the olfactory system, plays a greater role in our psychological well-being, than was previously thought .

.

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