If 50% of the population had schizophrenia we would have had a cure 30 years ago.
When AIDS was confined to gay men and IV drug users nobody cared. The U.S. government didn’t care (the NIH was given hardly any money to study AIDS), and Big Pharma didn’t care (yeah, AZT came to market (a drug that didn’t work and had terrible side effects–sound familiar?)). In a cruel twist, it was only when more and more people contracted HIV did the government increase funding, and Big Pharma, seeing the opportunity to make Big Money, started bringing effective drugs to market like it was going out of style.
Schizophrenia is confined to 1% of the population, and if history repeats itself, the government and Big Pharma will only care when that percentage gets a lot larger.
That’s why I think the cure cannot be a simple tablet. But that does not mean a cure is not possible. They are working on treatments for stroke patients to repair damaged areas of the brain and restore function, and they are working, even years after the damage has occurred.
We’re beginning to understand the plasticity of the brain and how it can heal through studying creatures like salamanders and zebrafish which can regenerate.
They can connect prosthetic limbs to be controlled by signals from the brain.
The cure isn’t going to happen next week or next year. It will be slow progress. But it is going to happen. There is plenty incentive. They’re working on curing diseases that only affect 40,000 people in the US. Sz affects millions. Does it get as much attention as it should? No, but as the population ages, more money, both from government and private sector is being invested in regenerative medicine for things like Alzheimers and stroke, and those principles of repair can be applied to other kinds of brain diseases.
Well, here’s one example of how damaged brains can be repaired. I’m not saying it’s perfect, but think of it as a proof-of-concept that brains can indeed be repaired.
About 1.2 million people in the US have HIV. What’s the number of sz cases? 2 or 3 million I think.
There was a lack of research early on because of misguided moralizing. And today, it still sucks to have HIV. The medication is expensive, has serious side effects, you still get sick, and at best, it’s a chronic illness that is going to affect how you live your life. Nevertheless, even though many people thought there would never be a cure or effective treatment due to the nature of the virus, a retrovirus, I think we are now seeing that we will be able to both prevent and cure this disease sooner rather than later.
The professionals know so little about schizophrenia it’s sad really.
I mean how can you cure something if you don’t know anything about it?
Not really sure that it is actually brain damage - certainly feels like it.
My point is that the new meds coming out won’t cure schizophrenia but might be more effective and not as damaging to our health.
I don’t think it’s fair to say we don’t know anything about it. We’re learning more every day. The technology is getting to where we can see what’s going on in a living brain - I don’t mean thoughts of course, but hyper and hypo activity. We can now actually follow an individual neuron firing in the brain. We can see structures without just having to autopsy brains after death. We are gaining some understanding about how the expression of certain genes changes how the brain works. Does your pdoc know this? Probably not unless he’s really interested. But he’s not going to be the one to find a cure.
I do think the meds coming out soonish will just be another option and hopefully help a few more people, whether through fewer side effects, treatment of symptoms for which no current treatment exists, or help for those with treatment resistant sz. But yeah, no pharmaceutical company has a cure in their pipeline right now.
Adding to the complexity of schizophrenia is the environmental aspect of the disorder. Schizophrenia, by most accounts, is not solely a brain disorder, but a brain-based disorder with an interplay of environmental factors.
How are we going to quantify the interplay of environmental factors?
In a stroke part of the brain often dies. How can you bring something back from the dead? By the time you can cure an injury like this which has already taken place we should be able to cure other forms of death. Can you imagine curing death.
In sz brain structural abnormalities are present, in other words parts of the brain are bigger or smaller, and sometimes certain regions have unusual connections. Everyone with schizophrenia has different structural abnormalities than the next person, how can we cure all of us at the same time if we have different versions of the same problem? Our brains have less gray matter than ordinary people. We can’t get in there and change that with current technology, any more than I can say I want to have size 8 feet and be such and such height, doctor fix me…
Regenerating body parts? This isn’t X-men this is real life. By the time we accomplish these things the internet will have become obsolete. Those frontiers are just too extremely advanced to even consider.
Meanwhile the majority of the growing world doesn’t even have access to food or medicine or even a place to use the toilet. And you are arguing that we are so advanced right now.
We have a long way to go, by that I mean centuries. By then we will have a resource-based machine economy and will be colonizing the galaxy. In 2017 we are still giving people electric shock therapy.
Did you see the clinical trial results on the use of stem cells in stroke? I don’t think I would call it bringing the brain back from the dead, but it seems what is happening is the connections that were destroyed during the stroke were regrown. This is in people, not in rats, so clearly it is possible.
In the stroke study, the cells were applied to the damaged areas of the brain. I suspect any treatment for sz would also have to be directed to damaged areas of each persons brain. We can see what areas those are now.
With less complicated organs like pancreas and eye, we’re almost there. It’s not better than OEM, but it’s already happening. I have no idea what will replace the Internet, but that technology will evolve too.
Access to toilets and medical science don’t move on the same curve any more than the ability to send probes into space corresponds to our ability to feed everybody - although that is improving too and fewer people are desperately poor worldwide now than were 50 years ago.
You’re certainly entitled to your opinion, and I guess it depends on what you mean by close. Some might think 20 or 25 years is close. Others will think it’s a long time out.
I’m sorry I hadn’t read much about stem cells for strokes, they have really made impressive strides with that haven’t they.
The reason I am so cynical about this is that I was watching youtube videos about stroke patients and one guy was followed up years later. His speech was at like a first grade level four years later and he was in his 30s. I concluded from this that injuries to part of the brain shut off too much brain machinery for us to ever recover complicated functions. But after looking at an article I think neurologists are really accomplishing some great stuff.
I hate typing on my phone, it takes forever.
In sz I don’t think the issue is damage to the brain, though there tends to be a reduction in size and abnormalities in function in sz.
Really piecing together sz is like navigating a maze in the dark. Or assembling a puzzle blind. The rules for understanding it have not yet been discovered and we are only just beginning to recognize something more than “everything goes wrong”. The brain is the most complicated organ in the body.
Yes it is terribly complicated. I don’t think we can entirely separate brain damage from brain chemistry and genetic and environmental factors; each of those things affects the other.
I was also thinking of how do we separate the factors. Is there a chronological order to the factors? Are people born with brain damage from brain chemistry?
Or is it a chicken-and-egg situation as to chronology? Maybe a “perfect storm” among the factors?
I don’t think it’s brain damage per say. The image I have of it in my head is areas of the brain (that still exist). Not connecting properly with each other, because of microscopic chemical imbalances.
The damage that’s done comes from the psychosis and can heal, if the underlying chemical imbalance is corrected. I’ve seen my own brain do some pretty amazing things considering I was drooling on Clozaril for a year and then was able to completely stop meds twice and function with a job a gf friends the whole nine. The only problem is the damage that psychosis or hopelessness from psychosis does to ones internal ego and self worth. If they stopped my psychosis tomorrow and I no longer needed antipsychotics the damage that’s been done to me emotionally would take years of drinking and drugging to overcome. Therapy is ■■■■■■■■