schizophrenia – F.I.G.H.T for your health!

Insanity virus — a crazy idea?

Linda — Sun, 03 Oct 2010 05:20:59 +0000

This research about the “insanity” virus has not stopped, and in fact, the more you read up on endogenous retrovirus the more you will see that this all further reinforces my FIGHT4yourhealth concept. The June Discover magazine on the newsstands brings this story up to date but the more you become interested in the infection component of today’s epidemic of impaired health, the more you will see how this infection from endogenous retroviruses found in what we used to call our JUNK DNA, helps explain Bipolar and MS as well as Schizophrenia.

Maybe we all need to get toxins out so our immune system can handle these inborn infections better, and more of us will need to lower the total body burden of all infections fungal bacterial and viral using ACS 200 Silver that is proven to efficiently lower even Borrelia and Candida.

This is worth really understanding, as this is real and when we begin to understand how these virus that are in our DNA are kept under control, until certain things happen, like a severe viral infection during pregnancy, and then years later the child starts to hear voices
etc. I have covered on my website with 8 hours of webinars, the topics of Food, Infection, Genetics, Hormones, Toxins, etc but this aspect of infection was not covered. If we think about it, there could be some tie in here to the live virus given children when they receive their MMR, and subsequent development of Autism. There could be a HERV-W involved in that condition too.

Garry F. Gordon MD,DO,MD(H)
President, Gordon Research Institute
www.gordonresearch.com

Excerpt:

#1: http://discover.coverleaf.com/discovermagazine/201006/?pg=64#pg65

#2: http://articles.sfgate.com/2002-08-05/news/17557040_1_mental-illness-mental-health-dr-e-fuller-torrey

Insanity virus — a crazy idea? / Mainstream psychiatric outcast ponders parasitic mental illness
August 05, 2002|By Keay Davidson, Chronicle Science Writer

#3: New Findings Boost Theory That Infection Causes Schizophrenia

Psychiatric News March 19, 2010
Volume 45 Number 6 Page 1
© American Psychiatric Association
1. Mark Moran

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.
Fast forward to 2009 when another group of researchers seeking to explore the neurochemical mechanisms for the parasite’s behavioral manipulation of its host discover a likely culprit. In a paper published in the March 2009 PLoS One, Glenn McConkey, Ph.D., and colleagues at the University of Leeds found that the genome of the T. gondii parasite encodes the enzyme tyrosine hydroxylase, the central enzyme in dopamine synthesis.
“Intriguingly, dopamine is the most logical neurotransmitter candidate for altering the avoidant behavior of the rodent,” McConkey told Psychiatric News. “So it would make sense for the parasite to increase dopamine. For the parasite, this is an ideal way to manipulate the behavior of the host.”

New Credibility for Infectious Etiology
And this strange cat-and-mouse story has yet another wrinkle.
For decades, an excess of dopamine has been implicated in schizophrenia. And so last year’s discovery that T. gondii synthesizes dopamine has lent new credence to an intriguing, though not universally accepted, theory—that at least some forms of schizophrenia may be caused by infection.

Among researchers inclined to the theory, T. gondii has been one, among several, of the most prominent candidates.

“Humans infected with T. gondii will form the same cysts on the brain as are found in infected rodents when high levels of the gene involved in dopamine synthesis are expressed,” McConkey said. “While production of dopamine in the rodents could be an evolutionary mechanism devised by the parasite, in humans it would be merely accidental. But now suddenly, this provides a possible link to the observed correlation of T. gondii with some forms of schizophrenia.”

The theory of an infectious etiology for at least some forms of schizophrenia has a long history, though it is still outside the mainstream. As far back as the 1960s, British epidemiologist Edward Hare, Ph.D., documented a marked increase in late-winter and early-spring births of people with schizophrenia, a finding that pointed to an infection, possibly acquired during winter months in utero.

Psychiatrist E. Fuller Torrey, M.D., a long-time proponent of the theory, published a paper in the Lancet as early as July 1973 titled “Slow and Latent Viruses in Schizophrenia.”
Since then, Torrey has published a number of papers with Johns Hopkins University pediatrician and virologist Robert Yolken, M.D., showing increased antibodies to T. gondii—possibly acquired in utero or early childhood through exposure to cat feces, undercooked meat, or contaminated water, dirt, or sand—among people with schizophrenia.
Meanwhile, infectious agents have been implicated in other diseases—the heliobacter pylori virus in peptic ulcers, the papilloma virus in cervical cancer—that had been considered unlikely candidates for infection. “It’s no longer a theory from Mars,” Torrey told Psychiatric News. “We’ve arrived on planet Earth.”

Epidemiologic Data Accumulate
Now, a report published online in AJP in Advance on February 1 by Alan Brown, M.D., of Columbia University and colleagues, reviews more than 40 studies looking at seroepidemiologic findings, ecologic data, and maternal reports on prenatal exposure to influenza and other infectious agents and the development of schizophrenia.

They found that odds ratios for associations between schizophrenia in offspring and serologically documented maternal influenza, elevated levels of antibody to T. gondii, and other peri-conceptional genital or reproductive infections ranged between 3.0 and 5.0.
The study, “Prenatal Infection and Schizophrenia: A Review of Epidemiologic and Translational Studies,” was done in collaboration with Catherine Schaefer, Ph.D., director of the Kaiser Permanente Research Program on Genes, Environment, and Health, and Barbara Cohn, Ph.D., director of the Child Health and Development Studies, funded primarily by the National Institutes of Health.

In a study published in the April 2005 American Journal of Psychiatry, titled “Maternal Exposure to Toxoplasmosis and Risk of Schizophrenia in Adult Offspring,” Brown and colleagues conducted serological assays for Toxoplasma antibody on maternal serum specimens from pregnancies giving rise to 63 cases of schizophrenia and other schizophrenia spectrum disorders and compared them with assays from 123 matched healthy subjects.

They found that the adjusted odds ratio of schizophrenia/schizophrenia spectrum disorders for subjects with high maternal Toxoplasma IgG antibody titers was 2.61.
“The infectious theory has garnered more interest in the research community,” Brown told Psychiatric News. “This is being driven in part by accumulating data from epidemiological studies of schizophrenia and translational neuroscience in which offspring exposed prenatally to immune challenge and infection show evidence of neurobiological abnormalities found in schizophrenia.”

A Gene-Environment Interaction
Still, the pathogenic theory of schizophrenia runs counter to years of orthodox thinking that schizophrenia is a congenital, organic brain disorder. Maternal and intrauterine infections are notably common, so one question is that if schizophrenia is infectious in origin, why aren’t more offspring born with schizophrenia?

But proponents acknowledge that infection alone is unlikely to cause schizophrenia. “Infections are almost certainly interacting with susceptibility genes and other environmental factors,” Brown explained. “So gene-environment interactions likely play a very important role.”

Nor do proponents of the pathogenic theory insist that infection is necessarily the cause of all schizophrenia.

“While replication in independent samples is warranted, the data from our sample suggest that up to approximately 30 percent of schizophrenia cases could be prevented in the offspring of the pregnant population [in the review appearing in AJP in Advance] if we were to completely eliminate three of the infections we studied—influenza, elevated Toxoplasma antibody, and peri-conceptional genital-reproductive infections,” Brown told Psychiatric News.

While complete eradication is highly unlikely, Brown says, the finding has implications for prevention and treatment (see Can Infection-Related Schizophrenia Be Prevented?).
More “orthodox” researchers acknowledge that infection may be a factor in a more expansive research vision looking at “domains of psychosis” in which schizophrenia-like symptoms stem from different gene-environment interactions.

“Most people acknowledge today that schizophrenia is never going to be found to have a single etiology,” said psychiatric researcher and AJP deputy editor Carol Tamminga, M.D., of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center. “It’s more likely a syndrome like congestive heart failure than a disease like Parkinson’s with a single molecular lesion. So we can assume that schizophrenia is a diagnosis with multiple etiologies and overlapping risk factors.

“We know genetics and environmental factors are risks,” she continued. “Keeping an open mind, I think we will find a list of risk genes and a list of environmental factors, and we will have to see how both of those play out in producing symptoms of a brain disease like schizophrenia.”

An abstract of “Fatal Attraction in Rats Infected With Toxoplasma Gondii” is posted at <www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11007336>. “A Unique Dual Activity Amino Acid Hydroxylase in Toxoplasma Gondii” is posted at <www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0004801>. “Prenatal Infection and Schizophrenia: A Review of Epidemiologic and Translational Studies” is posted at <http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/reprint/appi.ajp.2009.09030361v1>. “Maternal Exposure to Toxoplasmosis and Risk of Schizophrenia in Adult Offspring” is posted at <http://ajp.psychiatryonline.org/cgi/content/full/162/4/767>.
http://pn.psychiatryonline.org/content/45/6/1.2.full

Related articles
Clinical & Research News: Can Infection-Related Schizophrenia be Prevented? Psychiatr News March 19, 2010 45:19

Neuroanatomic and cognitive abnormalities related to herpes simplex

Linda — Tue, 15 Jun 2010 04:46:33 +0000

Full article: http://www.schres-journal.com/article/S0920-9964(10)00046-0/abstract

Excerpt:

Herpes simplex virus 1 (HSV-1) tends to replicate in the temporal cortex and can damage the limbic system. The presence of serum antibodies to HSV-1 is associated with cognitive impairment in adults with schizophrenia, suggesting that cerebral gray matter abnormalities might distinguish patient subgroups defined by HSV-1 exposure. We assessed 43 adult outpatients with schizophrenia. The assessment included clinical interviews, neurocognitive testing, anatomic brain magnetic resonance imaging and measures of serum IgG antibodies specific to herpes simplex viruses 1 and 2. We then compared 25 patients who tested positive for antibodies to HSV-1 with 15 who were seronegative for both HSV-1 and HSV-2. The seropositive patients performed significantly worse than the seronegative patients on four neuropsychological measures of psychomotor speed, executive functioning, and explicit verbal memory. Voxel-based morphometric analyses revealed that the same patients showed reduced gray matter volume in the anterior cingulate and areas of the cerebellum.

Infections – a cause of schizophrenia?

Linda — Sat, 10 Apr 2010 04:43:52 +0000

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.

Destroying confidence in Vitamins

Linda — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:15:33 +0000

Full article: http://www.orthomolecular.org/resources/omns/v06n02.shtml

Excerpt:

How To Destroy Confidence In Vitamins When You Do Not Have The Facts

(OMNS, January 11, 2010) “Ladies and Gentlemen, welcome to this year’s annual meeting of the World Headquarters Of Pharmaceutical Politicians, Educators, and Reporters (WHOPPER).

“Let us get right to the point. Many of our members and affiliates have complained about what is, for us, an alarming and dangerous segment of health care: so-called ‘orthomolecular medicine.’ We wish to assure you, although this therapeutic approach is, unfortunately, very effective in preventing and treating disease, that we will make sure the public will never learn of it. We can say this with considerable confidence, since for over 50 years we have managed to keep virtually all psychiatrists from using niacin to treat schizophrenia; we have kept cardiologists from prescribing vitamin E and co enzyme Q10 for heart disease; and we have kept general practitioners from prescribing vitamin C for viral illnesses.

“Yes, it has really been a triumphant half-century. How did we do it? It is really quite easy. Here is a summary for those of you that may have missed the last WHOPPER meeting.

Heart Disease A ‘Silent Killer’ In Patients With Severe Mental Illness

Linda — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 06:56:22 +0000

http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/170934.php

A large new study confirms that people with severe mental disorders – such as schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders – are 25 percent to 40 percent more prone to die from heart disease than people without mental illness are.

Moreover, smoking and physical inactivity – behaviors that individuals potentially can change – significantly contribute to this increased risk of death, found researchers led by Amy Kilbourne, Ph.D.

They looked at results from the 1999 Large Health Survey of Veteran Enrollees in conjunction with the VA’s National Psychosis Registry and the National Death Index of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Including responses from more than 147,000 veterans, the study is the largest of its kind to ever take place. Most of the respondents were men and about two-thirds were 50 or older.

Kilbourne, associate director of the VA Ann Arbor National Serious Mental Illness Treatment Research and Evaluation Center in Michigan, and colleagues from Dartmouth Medical School conducted the study, which appears in the November-December issue of the journal General Hospital Psychiatry.

Patients with mental disorders who also had a diagnosis of diabetes – a known risk factor for heart disease and a side effect of some antipsychotic medications – were at high risk for heart disease-related mortality, as were patients with a diagnosis of dementia.

Smoking and lack of exercise, both common behaviors in people with mental disorders, contributed to the heart disease-related deaths considerably.

“These are devastating illnesses that lead to a lot of functional impairment, so many of these individuals have difficulty staying motivated to exercise to begin with, or finding places where they feel comfortable exercising,” Kilbourne said.

However, even when considering factors such as diabetes and lifestyle, researchers found that patients with schizophrenia or other psychotic disorders were still more likely to die from heart disease. “This suggests that we are either missing some factor, or there is something inherent about having these disorders that puts patients at greater risk for heart disease-related mortality,” Kilbourne said.

Eric Goplerud, Ph.D., director of the Center for Integrated Behavioral Health Policy in Washington, said that results of this study and others suggest that people with serious mental illnesses are far less likely to receive medical screening and general preventive care. He said that lack of coordinated care has serious consequences: “Serving their mental needs in one stovepipe and their medical needs in another is probably associated with premature mortality.”

“The issue of cardiovascular disease in this population is huge,” Goplerud said. “As we look at national health reform, it is absolutely critical that people with mental illness and addictions be included – they are dying of preventable medical conditions.”

General Hospital Psychiatry is a peer-reviewed research journal published bimonthly by Elsevier Science. For information about the journal, contact Wayne Katon, M.D., at (206) 543-7177.

Kilbourne AM, et al. Excess heart-disease-related mortality in a national study of patients with mental disorders: identifying modifiable risk factors. Gen Hosp Psychiatry 31(6), 2009.

Source
Health Behavior News Service