3 ms·

Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even

by devinj 16y ago

Schizophrenia is, to my understanding, sort of a catch-all phrase for several different problems with similar symptoms but different effective treatments. Even in the study, they found only 49% of people with schizophrenia were infected.

Groxx 16y ago
There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months. The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.
mkramlich 16y ago
That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.
- philwelch 16y ago
  Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. It's really weird to characterize diseases by their effects rather than their cause, because then you don't really have a disease per se, but rather a pattern of symptoms that may or may not always have the same cause. One major example is SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which appears to be little more than a medical term for "the baby died of asphyxiation and we can't figure out how".
  - rbanffy 16y ago
    "we can't figure out" That's also synonymous with "it's a viral infection".
jeangenie 16y ago
this being the second time i've heard the term "catch-all" in this thread, note that words in areas outside of medicine have a similar porosity. our understanding of many things is still naive.

by devinj 16y ago

Groxx 16y ago

There are a depressing number of such umbrella-terms. The (likely) grand-daddy of them all being "chronic fatigue", which you'll almost certainly get applied to you if you have an undiagnosed cause of "fatigue" for more than 6 months. The depressing part is that such umbrella terms prevent study of the causes, because they likely come from many sources, and muddle any research.

mkramlich 16y ago

That's why that 49% figure is so exciting. Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. And not only could there be different diseases that have very similar symptoms but it's possible that a single disease could be reached via a different set of initial/contributing causes, or at least a slightly different causal pathway. For example, take some hypothetical disease that is found to be "caused by" a lack of vitamin D. Well, it may be possible that a particular person gets plenty of vitamin D intake, but that they have a gene variant that makes their body not utilize vitamin D normally. Or perhaps their genes are fine, but they have some other gross bodily malfunction (organ failure?) that is causing the vitamin D utilization process to be disrupted or minimized. Regardless of the specific chain of causation, they could all result in the same unhealthy symptoms expressed.

philwelch 16y ago
Because it's so high it could mean that, say, this retro-virus truly is involved in 100% of cases of true schizophrenia, but that those other 51% of the people either (a) don't really have precisely "schizophrenia" but a slightly different disease that just has very similar symptoms, and/or (b) experimental error of some kind. It's really weird to characterize diseases by their effects rather than their cause, because then you don't really have a disease per se, but rather a pattern of symptoms that may or may not always have the same cause. One major example is SIDS (Sudden Infant Death Syndrome), which appears to be little more than a medical term for "the baby died of asphyxiation and we can't figure out how".
- rbanffy 16y ago
  "we can't figure out" That's also synonymous with "it's a viral infection".

jeangenie 16y ago

this being the second time i've heard the term "catch-all" in this thread, note that words in areas outside of medicine have a similar porosity. our understanding of many things is still naive.