"Jumping Genes" Linked To Schizophrenia 77
sciencehabit writes "Roaming bits of DNA that can relocate and proliferate throughout the genome, called 'jumping genes,' may contribute to schizophrenia, a new study suggests (abstract). These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease. The study could help explain how genes and environment work together to produce the complex disorder and may even point to ways of lowering the risk of the disease, researchers say."
Huh? (Score:5, Funny)
These rogue genetic elements pepper the brain tissue of deceased people with the disorder and multiply in response to stressful events, such as infection during pregnancy, which increase the risk of the disease.
What sort of pregnancies and stressful events are deceased people having?
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Then perhaps the writer of the article should have chosen a better voice to have written his article in.
As written, these rogue genetic elements multiply in the brain tissue of the deceased in response to stress.
Dead or undead? (Score:1)
Better or worse than the "normal" type? Watch out for schizophrenic zombies!
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Then perhaps the writer of the article should have chosen a better voice to have written his article in.
As written, these rogue genetic elements multiply in the brain tissue of the deceased in response to stress.
Or better yet, a better voice in which to have written his article.
Of course if you're a pregnant schizophrenic zombie, chances are you've got plenty of stress in response to which these rogue genetic elements might multiply.
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Believe it or not pregnant women can die too. From any number of causes.
Infection during pregnancy is a risk factor for schizophrenia in the child [schizophrenia.com], not the mother. This is particularly true of influenza.
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What sort of pregnancies and stressful events are deceased people having?
Well, zombie births happen all the time. Just ask Cherie Priest.
Re:Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
UGH.
Sorry, but, please, can we stop this? Schizophrenia is not a "Hi I'm me. 'And I am me too!'" kind of deal. At all. Period. It's not Multiple Personality Disorder, in fact it usually doesn't involve anything like what any media portrayal has ever been. It's more of an intrusive pattern. You know who you are, but there are people whispering, singing, yelling, in your ears - outside your window - in the bathroom - anywhere around you. Telling you to do things? Maybe. Probably not. More like being annoying. But one turns into two turns into many turns into noise and chatter and intense periods of thoughts you can't escape, you can't focus on, and you can't stop. It's incredibly debilitating, but more often than not you have no problem understanding it's not "you" that's in those voices and thoughts - the real problem is understanding that those voices and thoughts are indeed coming FROM you.
The idea that schizophrenia is akin to what you see in Sybil or the media in general is usually wrong. I've yet to see any good reporting on the topic, but people throw it around plenty. "Oh, the market was up, the market was down: it's being schizophrenic." No, if the market was "schizophrenic" it would have trouble concentrating and possibly hallucinate while being extremely paranoid. At times. For the most part it would keep to itself and try to read or at least talk to someone else because it's going through something terribly difficult that no one takes the time to understand.
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UGH.
Sorry, but, please, can we stop this? Schizophrenia is not a "Hi I'm me. 'And I am me too!'" kind of deal. At all. Period. It's not Multiple Personality Disorder, in fact it usually doesn't involve anything like what any media portrayal has ever been. It's more of an intrusive pattern. You know who you are, but there are people whispering, singing, yelling, in your ears - outside your window - in the bathroom - anywhere around you. Telling you to do things? Maybe. Probably not. More like being annoying. But one turns into two turns into many turns into noise and chatter and intense periods of thoughts you can't escape, you can't focus on, and you can't stop. It's incredibly debilitating, but more often than not you have no problem understanding it's not "you" that's in those voices and thoughts - the real problem is understanding that those voices and thoughts are indeed coming FROM you.
The idea that schizophrenia is akin to what you see in Sybil or the media in general is usually wrong. I've yet to see any good reporting on the topic, but people throw it around plenty. "Oh, the market was up, the market was down: it's being schizophrenic." No, if the market was "schizophrenic" it would have trouble concentrating and possibly hallucinate while being extremely paranoid. At times. For the most part it would keep to itself and try to read or at least talk to someone else because it's going through something terribly difficult that no one takes the time to understand.
I've always thought of schizophrenia as those of us who have an imagination like the rest of us, but can't always recognize the difference. If you think about it, anyone can "hear" voices or "see" things in your head, as if they were truly real. We can recreate any experience in our minds because that's where experiences exist. But most people can tell the difference.
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No, if the market was "schizophrenic" it would have trouble concentrating and possibly hallucinate while being extremely paranoid
Sounds about right.
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> What sort of pregnancies and stressful events are deceased people having?
A guy called Dante described quite a lot of stressful events. It depends on where you end up, basically. Paradise good, Hell bad, Limbo rock.
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What sort of pregnancies and stressful events are deceased people having?
I can only imagine how stressful it is when you're dead and suddenly find out that you're pregnant. In fact, forget the "dead" part.
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I'd say that death would be a very stressful event.
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Well, becoming deceased might have been stressful at the time. Once the even is over with, however, one would think it smooth sailing.
Retroposons (Score:4, Informative)
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Jumping genes are better known as retroposons. Shame on Science for not explaining this.
Also, folks who suffer from schizophrenia actually have very low levels of latent inhibition. This makes them faster to respond to all stimuli, not just novel stimuli.
Shame of slashdot for not reporting this, either. They really should just give us EVERYTHING when talking about science, ALL at once.
Re:Retroposons (Score:5, Interesting)
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I got fooled by those jumping genes once. They just have a worm inside, indeed the hardware necessary to move themselves.
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To further clarify, retrotransposons do not "pepper the brain tissue". They are confined to the genome which is in the nucleus of a cell.
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Jumping genes are better known as retroposons. Shame on Science for not explaining this.
Why? Do you think just naming something explains it? Has creating the name schizophrenia explained anything? Has that classification improved life for the mentally ill?
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Not at all - in fact, it's made things worse. The term "schizophrenic" generally means something it isn't to most people - it's aligned with MPD and other disorders which really don't have anything to do with it. Thanks for sticking up for it :) Most people here will just go on there way misunderstanding it based on the name.
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Reminds me of: http://www.haveabit.com/feynman/2 [haveabit.com]
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If a person from south of the border has retroposons, do they have Mexican jumping genes?
mandatory testing (Score:1)
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Have you moo'd today?
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At which point we can have schizophrenic regenerative therapy. And large numbers of out and proud schizos protesting the evil scientists who want to change them.
Re:Hilarious. 'Schizophrenia' is caused by CHILDHO (Score:5, Interesting)
There's little evidence that what happens to children causes these disorders in adults. Barring organic brain damage, it's the underlying thought processes that cause a lot of dysfunction later on, but it's not the events themselves. Which is why one child might be scarred for life by being molested and another emerges relatively unscathed to become an advocate for the abused. The difference is primarily in how the children thought about the events. This applies to most other things as well, the way that you view and cope with the event is far more important to ones future risks of mental illness than the event itself.
There's also typically a genetic component that makes it easier or harder to cope with such situations as well as a cultural aspect that may include more or less helpful responses to the event.
Schizophrenia isn't a collection of behaviors, the behaviors are what psychologists use to identify the disorder, but it's not what causes the disorder. Now, if we started to give everybody in the general populace a SPECT or fMRI to see if they needed treatment, we would likely find that the diagnostic criteria change, but as people don't come in for random screenings against every possible mental illness, the screenings tend to focus on the behaviors. I expect that this will change as the brain scanning techniques become more affordable. Even a relatively inexpensive SPECT scan runs several grand and is overkill in most cases.
What you're arguing is like there being no such thing as a table because it's just a label given to movable objects that have a flat surface on top to hold things on while you're working.
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To add to the biological component, some study has attempted to link Celiac Disease in the mother to underdevelopment of key brain areas in the infant that lead to disorders such as schizophrenia. Makes sense, too, since the mother's body is busy "fighting" gluten and thus fighting it in the developing fetus as well, or so I understood it.
Not! (Score:1)
The genes are not really jumping; you're just hallucinating that.
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Best attempt at a joke on a mental illness thread I've seen here, ever. At least you understand something about schizophrenia.
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Schizoaffective sucks - if you need a good place to go, message me (if there's a way to do that?). There are plenty of good communities, and I know one that's been very helpful for friends of mine.
Best of luck to you!
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Schizophrenia due to infectious disease of the bra
Either you're into some weird stuff, your you need to watch the length limits of your subjects.
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Maybe so, but anyone who would sign a release to have their brain dissected ought to have his head examined.
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For the record, the above is a variation of a well known quote from Samuel Goldwyn [wikiquote.org]: "Anyone who would go to a psychiatrist ought to have his head examined"
I think the conclusions stated are a bit broad (Score:1)
saying these make up more than 50 percent of the code in your DNA is not something I've seen in medical genetics.
Perhaps their might be some confusion between "hot spots" or coding mishap regions which cause miRNA, siRNA, mRNA, and cisRNA to recode protein segments in response to environmental conditions, which can include stress (which is a factor, including environmental biochemical stress during pregnancy) and inflammation (which is a severe factor).
But the statement in the actual article that this is 50
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Well, it's all repetitive when you get down to it, GCAT kind of hard not to repeat sequences ....
Schizophrenic DNA .. (Score:1)
Presumably these schizophrenics would have been on long term antipsychotic medication. I wonder would this account for the increase in L1. How were these 'healthy people' defined as 'hea
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Presumably, but we don't know much about who they were or what their treatment was like. Where they locked up in padded rooms for the vast duration of their lives? There isn't much incentive to do more than sedate them. Were they actively working with a therapist and psychiatrist? Then they'd probably have more access to antipsycotics. Were they plain untreated? Knowing the sample would be very helpful...even in the "treated" population you have a wide array of tools that more often combat symptoms, not jus
The uses of schizophrenia diagnosis .. (Score:1)
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I know people with this illness, hearing voices seeing "hidden meanings" etc.
Note, hearing voices, and seeing "hidden meanings" are two entirely different things. I experience the latter, not the former. Note also the "hidden meanings" thing is also basically what is going on with a large percentage of religious people. Like really, lots of people. It's also something that was induced by the East German secret police (the Stasi) in order to silence political dissenters. (or tactics similar to that). And then lets not even bring up the fun of how that melts into "targeted adve
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ironically moments after that post, I see a user AHuxley reply to an earlier comment on another article. Another great example of 'hidden meaning' versus 'interesting coincidence' versus I'm too lazy and uninterested to see if AHuxley replied seconds after the LSD comment.
In any event, I'd also like to further add to the above sentiment, that I think in some cases the 'hearing voices' may be related to the same effect. I.e. the case of hearing something that sounds like a voice, then your by-evolutinary-a
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I once met such an individual, used hang round car-parks getting drunk and yelling at passerbys. A classic case of schizophrenia if there ever was one. Turns out he grew up in a small farm house with his mother. Mother dies and his brother came
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I think psychosis is a physiological human conscious response to electro-magnetic solar phenomenon. The craziest thing, is that there's already evidence that this theory might have legs [nih.gov].
It's like trying to download a much more advanced quantum consciousness into a limited RAM, standard binary human brain.
You seem to be implying that the sun is intelligent and is broadcasting its intelligence across radio frequencies, attempting to infect new hosts. Strange theory.
I wouldn't deny that it's possible that some people are sensitive to EM and that perhaps they have a brain structure that acts as an antenna, receiving noise but in trying to make sense of it, perceiving it as intelligent input.
This would have nothing to do with ancient worship. They simply believed (accurately) that the sun is the source of all
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Another diagnosis would be along the lines of "periods of psychosis," happening more than once, for an extended amount of time. Tack on some emotional bits for the "schizoaffective" aspect. A diagnosis of anything can and has been used for all sorts of nefarious reasons, but just because someone fakes a cold to get out of work, it doesn't mean that all people sneezing and coughing are liars.
vibrant cognitive diversity that helps humans (Score:2)
TFA says
One tantalizing possibility is that as these restless bits of DNA drift throughout the genomes of human brain cells, they help create the vibrant cognitive diversity that helps humans as a species respond to changing environmental conditions, and produces extraordinary "outliers," including innovators and geniuses such as Picasso,
But didn't they observe the same thing on mices?