Mental Health

MIAMI - If you're not a "cat person," this won't change your mind. If you are, you may want to look away. Scientists say a parasite spread by cats and is currently carried by over two billion people in the world (60M in the US), may lead to schizophrenia. The usually harmless T. gondii parasite is spread to humans through contact with cat litter trays and uncooked meat, the Daily Mail reports. However, a new study claims the parasite raises the risk of schizophrenia by 50 percent. Using data from more than 80,000 Danish blood donors, the scientists looked to find the presence of T. gondii. The parasite was found in a quarter of the donors, and 61 percent carried a similar parasite that "has also shown similar evidence of cognitive impairment." The study found that patients that had been infected with T. gondii had a 50 percent more chance  of being diagnosed with schizophrenia. Scientists believe the parasite may be disrupting the action of an amino...

Image of the mouse hippocampus. VIP interneurons are labeled red while other neurons innervating VIP cells are labeled green Losonczy lab/Columbia's Zuckerman Institute A new study out today in Neuron shows how a type of brain cell–VIP cells–affects navigation through our physical world as well as navigation through our memories. The delicate interplay between VIP cells and their neural cohorts may shine a spotlight on serious neuropsychiatric disorders as well as a unifying theory of mind (how the experience of your mental life corresponds to your brain activity). Background The majority of your brain cells are classified as excitatory cells. They’re the “on” switches.  The remaining cells are inhibitory cells–the “off” switches. But brain cells aren’t just some kind of binary on-off switch. Some inhibitory cells inhibit other inhibitory cells. It’s like a neural off-switch that shuts off other off-switches so they can’t shut off the on-switches (a brai...

Schizophrenia is a chronic and disabling mental illness that affects more than three million Americans. Anti-psychotic medication can control schizophrenia's psychotic symptoms, including the hallucinations and delusions that are well-known hallmarks of the disease. However, there are no effective treatments for the disease's 'negative symptoms' -- so-called because they involve a loss of normal function. The negative symptoms of schizophrenia include an inability to feel pleasure, a lack of motivation and difficulty with non-verbal communication. These symptoms can seriously impact patients' employment prospects, housing, relationships and overall quality of life. In a first-of-its-kind study, researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (BIDMC) used imaging data to determine the underlying anatomical cause of schizophrenia's negative symptoms and then applied non-invasive brain stimulation to ameliorate them. The scientists found, as they reported tod...

Share this Article You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. A smartphone app could help people with schizophrenia manage their symptoms, especially after regular clinic hours, a new study shows. “Individuals with serious mental illness can and do interact frequently with a mobile health app that provides added support to help them manage their illness,” says Eric Achtyes, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the psychiatry and behavioral medicine division at Michigan State University. The FOCUS app won’t replace clinicians, Achtyes says, but is “meant to fill in those gaps” when professional help is not readily available. For the new study, which appears in Schizophrenia Research , 367 patients at 10 national sites received the smartphone app to use within 60 days of their release from the hospital. The time period is particularly high risk for relapse and re-hospitalization, researchers say. Patients used the ap...

In what researchers describe as the largest study of its kind, scientists have found new evidence of a link between infection with the protozoan parasite, Toxoplasma gondii , and schizophrenia. T. gondii , a brain-dwelling parasite estimated to be hosted by at least 2 billion people around the world, doesn't create symptoms in most people who become infected – but acute cases of toxoplasmosis can be dangerous. Healthy adults are generally thought to not be at risk from T. gondii infections, but children or people with suppressed immune systems can develop severe flu-like symptoms , in addition to blurred vision and brain inflammation. Pregnant women need to be careful too, as the parasite can cause foetal abnormalities or even miscarriage . Aside from the known physiological dangers, however, the stranger and more ambiguous risks associated with the parasite remain largely hypothetical – although a huge body of research suggests something weird is going on. Causation rema...

KVOA, virtual channel 4, is an NBC-affiliated television station licensed to Tucson, Arizona, United States. KVOA consistently delivers the stories that people care about, and a highlight of its top-rated newscasts is News 4 Tucson Investigators, the station’s award-winning investigative unit. http://bit.ly/2Gbsund

A tool developed by University of Alberta researchers using machine learning diagnoses schizophrenia more accurately than other AI-based systems, according to a new study. The tool, called EMPaSchiz (Ensemble algorithm with Multiple Parcellations for Schizophrenia prediction), examined brain scans from patients who were diagnosed with schizophrenia and predicted the diagnosis with 87 per cent accuracy. The finding follows on a previous study in 2017 in which U of A and IBM researchers developed a tool capable of predicting schizophrenia with 74 per cent accuracy, and a study last year in which medical researchers used machine learning to predict with 82 per cent accuracy whether a patient would respond to risperidone, an antipsychotic medication. “Schizophrenia is characterized by a constellation of symptoms that might co-occur in patients. Two individuals with the same diagnosis might still present different symptoms. This often leads to misdiagnosis,” said Sunil Kalmady, a ...

Since the middle of the last century, researchers have been looking at a curious link - it seems that being born blind protects people from developing schizophrenia. Now, a large scale study has just added more evidence to confirm this is indeed the case. In particular, cortical blindness – caused by abnormalities in the brain, rather than damage in the eyes – seems to be incompatible with having schizophrenia. According to the authors of this latest research, no incidents of schizophrenia in cortically blind people have ever been recorded to date. The researchers analysed data from 467,945 children born in Western Australia between 1980 and 2001. In this sample, 1,870 children (0.4 percent) developed schizophrenia, but none of the 66 children in the sample who were born with cortical blindness ended up getting a schizophrenia diagnosis. "The protective phenomenon observed in case studies of people with congenital cortical blindness, and now supported by our whole-population...

A form of rare genomic structural variation called copy number variants (CNVs) may be more closely associated with schizophrenia than bipolar disorder. A new study published in Biological Psychiatry failed to find that CNVs were associated broadly with risk for bipolar disorder. However, schizoaffective disorder, which is a hybrid of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had higher rates of CNVs compared with controls and other bipolar disorder subtypes. "This study sheds important new light on the heterogeneity of bipolar disorder. It suggests an important new mechanism linking the biology of the most severely disabling form of bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, to that of schizophrenia," said John Krystal, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry . Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share many symptoms and genetic characteristics, but the contribution of CNVs to genetic risk has only been confirmed in schizophrenia. Although some studies have previously reported incre...

UPDATE: Kimberly Bernadette Duncombe was found and in “good condition,” Miami police said in a tweet Friday afternoon. Digital Access For Only $0.99 For the most comprehensive local coverage, subscribe today. #ReadLocal Miami police have issued an endangered adult missing person alert for Kimberly Bernadette Duncombe. She’s a 48-year-old white female with brown eyes and listed as “balding.” She’s 5-feet, 7-inches and 185 pounds. She suffers from schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, her family told police. Police, and her family, including her sister Kelly Duncombe, are concerned because she has been missing for two days — since Tuesday afternoon at 4 p.m., when she was last seen at 1458 NW 55th Terr. If you have seen Duncombe, call 305-603-6305 or 305-603-6300 or email 41532@miami-police.org. MISSING & ENDANGERED ADULT We need your assistance in locating Kimberly Duncombe who has been reported missing since 1/22/19 from the area of N.W. 14 Ave & 55 Ter...

A form of rare genomic structural variation called copy number variants (CNVs) may be more closely associated with schizophrenia than bipolar disorder. A new study published in Biological Psychiatry failed to find that CNVs were associated broadly with risk for bipolar disorder. However, schizoaffective disorder, which is a hybrid of bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, had higher rates of CNVs compared with controls and other bipolar disorder subtypes. "This study sheds important new light on the heterogeneity of bipolar disorder. It suggests an important new mechanism linking the biology of the most severely disabling form of bipolar disorder, schizoaffective disorder, to that of schizophrenia," said John Krystal, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share many symptoms and genetic characteristics, but the contribution of CNVs to genetic risk has only been confirmed in schizophrenia. Although some studies have previously reported increas...

[unable to retrieve full-text content] The Dog That Did Not Bark    Psychiatric Times The genome consortium studies have established, with a high degree of confidence, that certain loci genes are associated with schizophrenia and bipolar ... http://bit.ly/2CJhg66

People with schizophrenia have a hard time integrating information about a reward -- the size of the reward and the probability of receiving it -- when assessing its value, according to a study in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging . The inability to integrate the two factors correlated with more severe motivational deficits, suggesting that the impairment may contribute to decreased value placed on a reward, and thus reduced motivation to complete the task required to receive it. Using a computational model to tease apart components of reward estimation for decision making, the researchers, based at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, found that the impaired ability to integrate the size and probability of a reward was primarily caused by a lack of consideration of the reward magnitude. "The paper is a valuable contribution to the new field of Computational Psychiatry," said Cameron Carter, MD, Editor of Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive N...

A Michigan State University College of Human Medicine psychiatrist has found that most patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorder are willing to use a smartphone application to help manage their symptoms, including after regular clinic hours. “Individuals with serious mental illness can and do interact frequently with a mobile health app that provides added support to help them manage their illness,” said Eric Achtyes, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Medicine. The app FOCUS is not intended to replace clinicians, Achtyes said, but is “meant to fill in those gaps” when professional help is not readily available. His six-month study, published in the journal Schizophrenia Research, included 367 patients across 10 national sites, who were given the smartphone app to use within 60 days of their release from the hospital. This period of time is particularly high risk for relapse and re-hospitalization. Patients used the app ...

Peter Morgan / AP In this June 20, 2018, file photo, marijuana and a pipe used to smoke it are displayed in New York. A proposal to legalize marijuana has sprouted on Michigan’s November ballot, putting the state on the cusp of allowing recreational use of the drug for those 21 and older. It could also entice younger voters to show up to the polls, which could help the Democrats. By Benedict Carey, New York Times News Service Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2019 | 2 a.m. Nearly a century after the film “Reefer Madness” alarmed the nation, some policymakers and doctors are again becoming concerned about the dangers of marijuana, although the reefers are long gone. Experts now distinguish between the “new cannabis” — legal, highly potent, available in tabs, edibles and vapes — and the old version, a far milder weed passed around in joints. Levels of THC, the chemical that produces marijuana’s high, have been rising for at least three decades, and it’s now possible in some states to buy vape...