Study reinforces link between Chlamydia and schizophrenia
Could mental illness be infectious?
I don't think many of us who've been paying attention to the infectious/"chronic" disease link for many years would say these findings are "surprising," but they do indeed confirm what other preliminary studies have shown: that infectious agents can play a role in a variety of non-acute diseases, including mental disease (schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, PANDAS), cancer, heart disease, obesity, and autoimmune diseases, among others. (See also this blog entry.) One thing that hasn't often been seen, as mentioned, is reduction in the illness due to antibiotic treatment. In many cases, by the time symptoms of the "chronic" disease emerge, it's too late for antibiotic use--too much damage has been done, and in many cases, the host's immune system has already cleared the organism. It will be interesting to see if this study can be repeated in a larger population.
Now comes the surprising finding by a German research team that chlamydia may be linked with schizophrenia. Dr Rudolf Wank, an immunologist at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, has reported recently that schizophrenic patients are much more likely to be infected with one or more variants of chlamydia. More importantly, he found that targeting the bug with specially treated immune cells improved the patients’ symptoms dramatically.
About 40 per cent of the 75 patients he studied were infected with chlamydia, compared with 6 per cent in the control group (ie, people who did not have schizophrenia). As Dr Wank explains: “Chlamydia comes in three varieties, two of which can cause a flu-like respiratory infection or pneumonia, while the third causes the sexually transmitted disease. The patients were much more likely to have one or more of these.” The team also found that the risk of developing schizophrenia rose dramatically for patients with a certain group of immune system genes.
I don't think many of us who've been paying attention to the infectious/"chronic" disease link for many years would say these findings are "surprising," but they do indeed confirm what other preliminary studies have shown: that infectious agents can play a role in a variety of non-acute diseases, including mental disease (schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, PANDAS), cancer, heart disease, obesity, and autoimmune diseases, among others. (See also this blog entry.) One thing that hasn't often been seen, as mentioned, is reduction in the illness due to antibiotic treatment. In many cases, by the time symptoms of the "chronic" disease emerge, it's too late for antibiotic use--too much damage has been done, and in many cases, the host's immune system has already cleared the organism. It will be interesting to see if this study can be repeated in a larger population.
