www.discover.com/oct_01/featbiology.html -
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Published on: 10/17/2001
Last Visited: 10/17/2001
Now a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute , Dolores Malaspina applied to study medicine with one aim : to understand the illness that afflicts her younger sister.
At the time , people had the idea that schizophrenia was somehow a disease caused by how a family raised someone , Malaspina says.It was thought that there was a style of parenting called the 'schizophrenogenic mother , ' that a mother who raised a child and gave her mixed messages- they called them 'schisms and skews'- could induce this type of illness.That led to a tremendous amount of guilt and confusion..
Today schizophrenia is believed to be solely a disease of the brain.But in an ironic twist , Malaspina's quest for understanding- one that has taken her from her small office overlooking the Hudson River to a vast medical archive in Jerusalem- has led her right back to a parent.Only this time it's the father.
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Malaspina has found that about a quarter of all schizophrenics may owe their symptoms to spontaneous mutations in paternal sperm.And the older the father , the more likely his sperm is to carry such mutations.
Malaspina consulted a national registry of mental illness maintained by the State of Israel since 1950.At the time , isolated reports suggested that the youngest children in families have the highest risk of developing schizophrenia , but the reason for the trend was unclear.After poring over the medical records of more than 87 , 000 people born in Jerusalem between 1964 and 1976- 658 of whom had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or closely related psychoses- Malaspina reached a startling conclusion.Whereas one out of every 121 children born to men in their late twenties had developed schizophrenia by the age of 34 , one of every 47 children born to men age 50 to 54 developed the disease.In other words , after age 50 , a man's risk of having schizophrenic offspring seems to be more than twice that of a man who reproduces in his late twenties.
Malaspina's results were so surprising that some of her colleagues found them hard to digest.
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But Malaspina thinks the mechanism may be even stranger.Last year researchers at the Genetics Institute Inc. in Massachusetts announced that a gene carried by Yolken's retrovirus may play an integral role in building the human placenta.The protein for which the gene codes , called syncytin , both prompts placental cells to knit together to nourish a fetus and enables the virus to fuse with the cells it infects.The source of schizophrenia , in other words , may lie far back in fetal development , perhaps in faulty neuronal wiring.It could be that it's a neurodevelopmental disease , Malaspina says , in which a flawed gene derails the normal development of brain neurons..
The story is far from over.It's not clear , for instance , how a single mutant gene- even one involved in building the brain- can unleash the elaborate symptoms of schizophrenia.Contrary to popular belief , schizophrenics don't have split personalities , and they're rarely violent.But they do suffer from delusions , disordered thinking , and hearing voices , as well as extreme apathy and a profound inability to feel pleasure or motivation.Malaspina has tremendous hope that her research will lead to greater understanding of a misunderstood disease as well as hope for her own family.Last year her sister- who did , eventually , graduate from college- got married at the age of 46.Her husband , too , has schizophrenia.As for Dolores Malaspina : I'm poised to write a book.It will be called Sister , Psychiatrist , Scientist , Friend..
RELATED WEB SITES :
The National Institute of Mental Health has general information about schizophrenia : http : //www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/schizoph.htm.
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