Could bread and pasta be behind the pathogenesis of schizophrenia?Schizophrenia is an unfortunate disease of the brain. A progressive disorder, it often presents with social withdrawal, paranoia, hearing voices, that sort of thing. After quite a while (sometimes decades) you get a kind of "burnout" effect where the voices and whatnot lessen, but the afflicted is left with all the negative symptoms of social withdrawal, thought blocking, and an inexpressiveness known as "flat affect." MRI of the brain will show "large ventricles" at this point, meaning cell death (brain damage) has caused the active, lively part of the brain to shrink. You'll see schizophrenia in any large public park in any major city. If you ask the guy on the bench that everyone is avoiding if he wants something to eat, and he answers with paranoid meaningless word salad, that's schizophrenia, most likely. He had parents, brothers, sisters, maybe even a college degree. Even if he wanted to stay in a treatment facility or group home, in most places there aren't enough spots for all the mentally ill, so many end up homeless or in jail. A tough road for someone with an organic brain disease.
Most of the research on schizophrenia is focused on the neurotransmitters dopamine, acetylcholine, and histamine and genetic polymorphisms of transporters and receptors. The usual questions are asked about ineffective brain chemistry. The usual treatment is neuroleptic medication (hopefully decreases excess dopamine in the right place and leaves it well enough alone in other corners of the brain). And I've seen medicine do a decent job of clearing up the psychosis symptoms many times. Medicine tends to have pretty serious side effects, though, so a big push in research these days is to identify those folks at high risk for schizophrenia before it happens, hopefully to prevent the illness in the first place through various means. Often those means include more medications - but with Big Pharma funding many studies, those are the solutions that are found.
One intrepid researcher, F. Curtis Dohan, spent a lot of his career chasing an unlikely suspect in the pathogenesis of schizophrenia, wheat. His fascinating paper, "Genetic Hypothesis of Idiopathic Schizophrenia: It's Exorphin Connection", can be found in free full text via the
link.
Comment: To learn more about the Drugging of America and the dangerous and deadly side effects from prescription drugs read the following articles:
Drugging America: The drug industry exposed
100,000 Americans Die Each Year from Prescription Drugs, While Pharma Companies Get Rich
Pharmaceutical Deception - Are Prescriptions Really Safe to Take?
Poisoning by prescription drugs on the rise
Drug Side Effects "Neglected, Restricted, Distorted and Silenced" by Drug Companies
Pfizer: The Drug Giant That Makes Bank from Drugs That Can Kill You
The Over-Prescribing of Psychoactive Drugs to Children: A Scourge of Our Times