SMRI Research Update: Infectious agents may cause schizophrenia

TAC relies on its supporting organization, the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), to carry out research to ascertain the causes of and develop better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A recent update from SMRI follows.

Recent research, funded by SMRI, suggests that infectious agents may cause schizophrenia by getting in the brain several years before the person actually develops symptoms. The research is published in the January issue of the American Journal of Psychiatry and was done by David W. Niebuhr and his colleagues at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md.

They examined blood samples taken from military personnel entering service and taken periodically thereafter. Among these military personnel, they identified 200 who developed schizophrenia after they entered the service and compared them with 591 matched controls. The individuals who developed schizophrenia, compared to the controls, had elevated antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii, a protozoa carried by cats, as much as three years before they initially developed symptoms of schizophrenia. This protozoa has also been linked to schizophrenia in several other studies. The Niebuhr et al. paper confirms other data suggesting that whatever causes schizophrenia probably begins several years before the disease symptoms appear.

The current publication is in the American Journal of Psychiatry, vol. 165, pages 99–106. A good review paper on Toxoplasma gondii and schizophrenia is by Torrey EF et al., in Schizophrenia Bulletin (2007), vol. 33, pages 729–736.

SMRI research - an interview with Dr. Torrey

TAC relies on its supporting organization, the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), to carry out research to ascertain the causes of and develop better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In the following interview with Robin Cunningham Dr. E. Fuller Torrey - TAC’s president and director of laboratory research at SMRI- talks about possible causes of and treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Dr. Torrey and his colleagues have been looking very intently at infectious agents as possible causes of both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

"Probably there are four [infectious agents] that have really come to the front of it," he continued. "My first choice is Toxoplasma gondii, which is a parasite that is carried by cats... This is an area of great interest. The other infectious [agents] are viruses...cytomegalovirus, which is a herpes virus; herpes simplex viruses (HSV1 and HSV2); and endogenous retroviruses."

Dr. Torrey has published a number of papers on the evidence linking infectious agents to schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Most recently, he and Dr. Robert Yolken co-edited six papers on Toxoplasma gondii as a possible cause of schizophrenia that were published in the June 2007 issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin. These presented work from both their laboratories and from other researchers.

I asked him to elaborate on the potential connection between cats and schizophrenia…

More of Dr. Torrey’s interview with Robin Cunningham can be found on Schizophrenia Connection.

Research update: Parasite as schizophrenia cause?

TAC relies on its supporting organization, the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), to carry out research to ascertain the causes of and develop better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A recent update from SMRI follows.

SMRI continues to support promising research on infectious agents as possible causes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Much of this research is taking place in the Stanley Laboratory of Developmental Neurovirology at Johns Hopkins Medical Center under the direction of Dr. Robert Yolken, who is a member of the TAC Board of Directors. In a spring 2007 issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin, Drs. Yolken and Torrey coedited six papers on Toxoplasma gondii as a possible cause of schizophrenia. T. gondii is a protozoan parasite that occurs normally in cats but is transmitted to humans in a variety of ways.

More than 40 studies have found that individuals with schizophrenia have increased antibodies to T. gondii compared to unaffected controls. A paper describing these findings is featured on www.schizophreniaforum.org, a useful website for keeping up with schizophrenia research.

Research update: Metabolic abnormalities in schizophrenia

TAC relies on its supporting organization the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), which carries out research to ascertain the causes of and develop better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A recent update from SMRI follows.

One of the most successful SMRI grants has been to the Institute of Biotechnology at the University of Cambridge in England. The program, directed by Dr. Sabine Bahn, has continued to publish studies describing metabolic abnormalities in individuals with schizophrenia. Many of these abnormalities involve glucose metabolism, which is especially important since it is now known that antipsychotic medication can also disturb glucose metabolism. Dr. Bahn’s group is utilizing their findings to try to develop new medications for treating schizophrenia.

Research update: Genetic approaches to new tx

TAC relies on its supporting organization, the Stanley Medical Research Institute (SMRI), to carry out research to ascertain the causes of and develop better treatments for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. A recent update from SMRI follows.

On March 8, 2007, the Broad Institute in Cambridge, Massachusetts, announced that SMRI had awarded the institute $10 million a year for ten years to use genetic approaches to find new medications for treating schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. This is the largest single award ever given to a U.S. institution for psychiatric research.

The Broad Institute is a joint venture of Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The SMRI-funded program will be headed by Dr. Edward Scolnick, a highly experienced psychiatric researcher who was previously in charge of drug development at Merck Pharmaceuticals. The program will utilize the latest in rapidly advancing technology to identify which proteins are affected in these diseases and to then devise new medications to target these abnormal proteins. This new program is part of SMRI’s reallocation of resources to spend three-quarters of its funds to find new medications and the remaining one-quarter on research to find the causes of these diseases.