{"id":11025,"date":"2010-11-19T10:16:06","date_gmt":"2010-11-19T09:16:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mono-1en-1756"},"modified":"2010-11-19T10:16:06","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T09:16:06","slug":"schizophrenia-the-insanity-virus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/2010\/11\/19\/schizophrenia-the-insanity-virus\/","title":{"rendered":"Schizophrenia: The Insanity Virus?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tSchizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n\t[…]\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\n

\n\tSchizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but
\n\tthe person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled to have been
\n\tdifferent as a child or a toddler–more forgetful or shy or clumsy.
\n\tStudies of family videos confirm this. Even more puzzling is the
\n\tso-called birth-month effect<\/a>:
\n\tPeople born in winter or early spring are more likely than others to
\n\tbecome schizophrenic later in life. It is a small increase, just 5 to 8
\n\tpercent, but it is remarkably consistent, showing up in 250 studies.
\n\tThat same pattern is seen in people with bipolar disorder or multiple
\n\tsclerosis.<\/p>\n

\t“The birth-month effect is one of the most clearly established facts about schizophrenia,” says Fuller Torrey<\/a>,
\n\tdirector of the Stanley Medical Research Institute in Chevy Chase,
\n\tMaryland. “It’s difficult to explain by genes, and it’s certainly
\n\tdifficult to explain by bad mothers.”<\/p>\n

\tThe facts of schizophrenia are so peculiar, in fact, that they have
\n\tled Torrey and a growing number of other scientists to abandon the
\n\ttraditional explanations of the disease and embrace a startling
\n\talternative. Schizophrenia, they say, does not begin as a psychological
\n\tdisease. Schizophrenia begins with an infection.<\/p>\n

\tThe idea has sparked skepticism, but after decades of hunting, Torrey
\n\tand his colleagues think they have finally found the infectious agent.
\n\tYou might call it an insanity virus. If Torrey is right, the culprit
\n\tthat triggers a lifetime of hallucinations–that tore apart the lives of
\n\twriter Jack Kerouac, mathematician John Nash, and millions of others–is a
\n\tvirus that all of us carry in our bodies. “Some people laugh about the
\n\tinfection hypothesis,” says Urs Meyer<\/a>,
\n\ta neuroimmunologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
\n\tZurich. “But the impact that it has on researchers is much, much, much
\n\tmore than it was five years ago. And my prediction would be that it will
\n\tgain even more impact in the future.”\n\t<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n


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Schizophrenia has long been blamed on bad genes or even bad parents. Wrong, says a growing group of psychiatrists. The real culprit, they claim, is a virus that lives entwined in every person’s DNA. […] Schizophrenia is usually diagnosed between the ages of 15 and 25, but the person who becomes schizophrenic is sometimes recalled … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"koromo_page_header":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11025","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english-blog","koromo-columns","tablet-grid-50","mobile-grid-100","grid-parent","grid-50"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11025","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11025"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post\/11025\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11025"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11025"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/monochrom.at\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11025"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}