Infections – a cause of schizophrenia?
By Linda on Apr 10, 2010 in Infections | comments(0)
New Findings Boost Theory That Infection Causes Schizophrenia
Full article: http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/6/1.2.full
Excerpt:
A review of studies of maternal exposure to infectious agents and schizophrenia in their offspring suggests that eliminating certain infections could prevent as many as 30 percent of schizophrenia cases.
Call it an instance of science being stranger than science fiction, and of nature’s unintended consequences.
In 2000, a team of British researchers published a remarkable paper in the journal of the Royal Society titled “Fatal Attraction in Rats Affected With Toxoplasma Gondii.” It seems that rodents infected with Toxoplasmosis gondi (T. gondii), a parasite that normally thrives in cats, become fatally attracted to cat urine, causing them to shed their normal avoidant behavior in the presence of a cat.
Naturally, cat catches rodent and devours it, with the result that the parasite T. gondii is again where it belongs: in a feline host.
Observing this case of attraction gone fatally wrong, the researchers, from the University of Oxford, postulated that T. gondii, one of nature’s most successful organisms, had developed an ingenious evolutionary mechanism for manipulating the behavior of the rodent—in whom the parasite would have reached a dead end—so that the rodent seeks out, suicidally, the feline host in which the parasite can thrive and complete its life cycle.
