Wow, that’s pretty cool.
The findings indicated that the amount of active CRMP2 was too high in people with schizophrenia and, at least in young people with schizophrenia, was not balanced by an appropriate amount of increased inactive CRMP2. That imbalance between active and inactive CRMP2 could account for some dysfunctions in neural connections.
Measuring an abundance of active CRMP2, particularly if its ratio with inactive CRMP2 is too low, could become a format for a rapid, minimally invasive blood test to support the diagnosis of schizophrenia.
“Schizophrenia can be challenging to diagnose early on or in young patients for a number of reasons,” says Snyder. “Pairing a blood test with psychiatric and neurobehavioral exams could help doctors distinguish schizophrenia from other conditions that have somewhat similar symptomologies, such as the manic phase of bipolar disorder or other behavioral, personality, or thought disorders.
Going to have to read up on CRMP2 later.
I knew I had read about CRMP2 somewhere before.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2211124721002850
We recently reported that the function of the cytoskeletal coordinator CRMP2 (Dustrude et al., 2016; Fukata et al., 2002; Goshima et al., 1995; Niwa et al., 2017; Toyoshima et al., 2019; Yoshimura et al., 2005) is impaired by carbonylation of its residues, which leads to the generation of multimerized advanced glycation end products (AGEs) of CRMP2 (Toyoshima et al., 2019). Because the generation of carbonyl stress due to the elevation of oxidative stress has been proposed as an etiology of SCZ (Cabungcal et al., 2014; Itokawa et al., 2014, 2018; Miyashita et al., 2014; Sawa and Seidman, 2014), AGE-CRMP2 might be one of the key players in the pathogenetic pathway of SCZ. Betaine is an anti-carbonyl stress metabolite, and its plasma and brain expression levels tend to be downregulated in patients with SCZ
I read that but I don’t really understand it. I don’t even really understand if betaine increases or decreases active CRMP2.
Hopefully they follow this up.
I’m trying to open the original paper, by Munetaka Nomoto, titled “Clinical evidence that a dysregulated neural network modulator may aid in diagnosing schizophrenia”, but the link fails to work. Returns a message than no article has been found.
There’s emerging research that taking high dose acetylcholine during pregnancy will prevent most cases of Sz, ADHD, depression, bipolar etc etc. The researchers are virtually certain that it will become a public health guideline in the future similar to advice to take folic acid during pregnancy. It’ll take another 15 years for the clinical trials for this research to give definitive results but the researchers are pretty near certain that it’ll work.
Here’s the lead investigator giving a summary of the research. 15 minute clip.
I filed a complaint and they have just sent me the working link to the article.