MIT Engineers World's First Schizophrenic Mice

Frosty Piss writes "MIT researchers have created a schizophrenic mouse that pinpoints a gene variation predisposing people to schizophrenia. Research with the mouse may lead to the first genetically targeted drugs for the disease, which affects 1 percent of the population worldwide. This is the first study that uses animals who demonstrate an array of symptoms observed in schizophrenic patients to identify specific genes that predispose people to the disease."

and how do you diagnose this?

[Anonymous Coward]

im too lazy to go digging around the article, but diagnosing schizophrenia in a human being ... ok.

actually they dont even know how to diagnose it exactly.

"People diagnosed with schizophrenia usually experience a combination of positive (i.e. hallucinations, delusions, racing thoughts), negative (i.e. apathy, lack of emotion, poor or nonexistant social functioning), and cognitive (disorganized thoughts, difficulty concentrating and/or following instructions, difficulty completing tasks, memory problems). "

http://www.schizophrenia.com/diag.php#diagnosis [schizophrenia.com]

now, how do you find out if a mouse has those problems?

besides, only a psychiatrist can diagnose schizophrenia, which we learned yesterday from slashdot posters, is just another 'left wing conspiracy' major, an evil liberal arts degree, when what this country really needs is more engineers blah blah blah etc etc etc.

Re:This may be a really ignorant question, but...

[packetmon]

By deleting a single gene in a small portion of the brains of mice, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center found that the animals were affected in a way resembling schizophrenia in humans.

After the gene was removed, the animals, which had been trained to use external cues to look for chocolate treats buried in sand, couldn't learn a similar task, the researchers report in a paper appearing in today's issue of The Journal of Neuroscience.

Dr. Robert Greene, professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues have found that eliminating a gene in a mouse's brain creates memory problems that are reminiscent of schizophrenia. T he researchers deleted the gene, which codes for a part of a protein involved in passing signals between nerve cells needed for learning and memory. When a similar protein is blocked by drugs in humans, it leads to a psychotic state similar to schizophrenia.

ORIGINAL [medicalnewstoday.com]

Technically, MIT wasn't first:
Schizophrenia - Mice With Defective Memory May Hold Clues
Main Category: Schizophrenia News
Article Date: 23 Jan 2006 - 21:00 PDT

Re:This may be a really ignorant question, but...

[SomeDanGuy]

Not a bad question. This article title is actually misleading - this is NOT the first model of a 'schizophrenic mouse'; it is the first one to identify a specific gene involved.
Animal models of these complex psychiatric diseases are always a bit questionable. This one seems to have bad memory formation, attention problems, and poor social skills. The researchers believe that's enough to call it a model of schizophrenia, but that's very difficult to say for sure.

Re:This may be a really ignorant question, but...

[morgan_greywolf]

Animal models of these complex psychiatric diseases are always a bit questionable. This one seems to have bad memory formation, attention problems, and poor social skills. The researchers believe that's enough to call it a model of schizophrenia, but that's very difficult to say for sure.

Right. These are just 'schizotypical' symptomps. Many other disorders feature schizotypical behaviour, including several developmental disorders, such as multiple-complex developmental disorder [google.com] and other disorders like shizotypical personality disorder [psyonline.nl], which feature schizotypical behaviour but are not true schizophrenia. I suspect that these mice have more of the latter disorders (which are thought to be genetic) rather than actual schizophrenia (which may or may not be genetic).

Re:I'm conflicted

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Well, I am an animal rights advocate, of the mild sort; I believe animals have rights, and we should respect those rights. OTOH, I also really like meat. And as far as this type of testing goes, IMO it's entirely a Good Thing.

There are well-established standards for the treatment of laboratory animals. Any institution that runs an animal lab is supposed to meet rigorous standards for living space, quality of food, cleanliness, etc., and have a veterinarian on staff (or at least on call) to look after the animals' well-being. They also need to take careful measures to avoid inflicting pain on the animals whenever possible. Now, I'm not saying that all labs live up to this, by a long shot, but I'd be willing to bet that MIT's labs do. And if the standards are followed, then even with the experimentation, the lab animals have much better, longer, healthier lives than their counterparts in the wild. Also, a lot of them end up as pets after their working lives are done; they get to spend their retirement being taken care of, generally very well, by the lab techs who know them best. Honestly, it's not a bad deal.

Re:Wrong.

[It'sYerMam]

You're looking for DID [wikipedia.org], down the hall.