Rage Disorder Linked with Toxoplasmosis (2016)
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Is has been linked to all sorts of disorders, including schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Prof. Jaroslav Flegr contributed many important studies, especially in the early stages of toxoplasmosis research [1]. He was also featured by an Atlantic article, which was one of the first to bring public attention to the field of research [2].
One particularly interesting finding is how it interacts with the RH factor. It might explain the relative stability of the distribution of the two types in the population even though one of them should have a serious disadvantage (birth complications) [3].
The hard question is how to prevent it. Due to how many different infection vectors there are, the only sound pieces of advice are "eat your meat well done" and "avoid getting in contact with garden soil". Development of a vaccine for cats is a promising solution since the parasite can only be transmitted by cats.
[1]: https://web.natur.cuni.cz/flegr/publ.php
[2]: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/03/how-you...
Scientists have immense incentives for publishing new results. As someone quipped, "there is no cost in getting something wrong; the cost is not being published."
Toxoplasmosis in particular seems intuitively like the perfect combination of new research plus massive prestige for whoever publishes papers on the topic. And we can't trust articles written on the topic either; they do little more than parrot whatever the scientists say, and don't really cast a critical eye on the methodology or findings.
Which makes sense. I mean, how could they? None of us are experts the way a scientist is an expert. But it used to be a hobby of mine to dig through research papers and find subtle inconsistencies. Take fatal familial insomnia, for example. It's not fatal due to the insomnia. That's a misnomer. But the fact that it wasn't related to the insomnia was buried on the 7th page of the report as basically a footnote.
I don't know. I just wish it were easier to take a lot of this at face value.
its easy to have something statistically significant but yet produce a shitty prediction. they then take this horrible model and use its coefficients to make ridiculous claims, like doing X makes you Y times more likely to Z.
thats great for a business wanting to find ways to make money, but when this crap gets in the government level these crappy models are used to legislate us.
Can you be more specific, what was the source or your learning? Was there a particular piece or pieces you read? If so would you be able to share them?
Why is it not great to feel this way? You give a bunch of good reasons why it is okay to feel as you do.
In general you should ignore any new research until it's had a large well run meta-analysis of it.
Until then, it's all "we think" and "maybe". And that's ok, unless you're forcing people to take a treatment or depriving them of their liberty based on the research.
Eh, not really much prestige, but perhaps lots of press.
The big thing is to not take any single paper as "scientific truth" like what you read in a textbook. The scientific literature is not a textbook, it's the place where science's self-correction happens. Things in text books have been battle-tested, and widely accepted usually due to replication. And even then, textbooks have errors and perpetuate some falsehoods! Any individual scientific paper will not even likely be replicated, because it's working on something that did not turn out to be fundamental to the path of science.
Scientific papers in the literature are how scientists share their small steps while exploring the n-dimensional world. That n is very high, so there are lots of directions to explore, and most of them will not be that interesting. If it is, somebody else may decide to take a look too. If it's a hot-topic, then many many people will. Scientists have to operate in a world where they are exploring what is and is not true, and their relationship with uncertainty is strong; it's absolutely essential to embrace uncertainty.
The biggest thing is to distrust news reporting about science. It's correct about 1% of the time. The motivations of a reporter trying to somehow make an interesting article by deadline on a topic they don't understand are far more distorted than the scientists publishing a paper they expect 30-50 people to ever read. And that's if you actually get a real reporter to look at these things; most articles are just press releases that are cut and pasted from a university press lackey into the newspaper's publishing system. Those are usually even worse.
Actually if the researchers expect the paper to be high impact they will often provide the press release to the University's press department themselves - these types of press releases are merely a layman directed abstract and tend to be reasonably OK.
This raises two interesting points.
1. Sometimes the lowest quality newspapers have the best quality article on a given publication.
2. Why aren't all research publications required to be accompanied by a second abstract written in plain low jargon language that can be understood at some level by someone with high school science?
Sometimes with hindsight one can go back to a paper and say "this is important because of X" but it can be really hard to do that at the beginning, and often times the true value of the data may be different than the hypothesis under which the data was originally generated.
Because the target audience of research publications is other researchers in the same field; while outreach to nonscientists is fine, it's simply not the goal of a research paper.
Besides, for many papers this is impossible and/or pointless. My research results are incremental results in a specialized subfield of mathematics. I don't know how to explain them in anything but the vaguest terms to anyone without a reasonable background in that subfield, and I also don't know why such a person would care about them.
I don't think there is one. We are fallible and even our best theories are tentative and provisional. When we do rely on ideas it only because we know no better alternatives.
While I absolutely agree with the general sentiment, some of the findings related to toxoplasmosis are well-replicated and supported by meta analysis, especially the link to schizophrenia and reaction time.
Flegr was mostly ignored for a decade and his findings are only now reaching mainstream recognition, after replication by independent teams.
Some of the recent "toxoplasmosis linked to X" papers are indeed of low-quality (low sample size and worse).
They actually say the parasite causes rats to become sexually attracted to cats, causing them to pass on to the cat once it's inevitably killed. Life sure does find a way.
Even if it's true that mosquitos can be removed from the foodchain with no negative effects ... are we so sure that wherever malaria goes (and I think it will go somewhere) won't be worse than mosquitos ?
I do worry about removing critters from the food chain; we've seen plenty of second- and third-order surprises from that. What do the things that eat mosquitos find next-most-tasty, for starters?
"The parasite my lab is beginning to focus on is one in the world of mammals, where parasites are changing mammalian behavior. It's got to do with this parasite, this protozoan called Toxoplasma. If you're ever pregnant, if you're ever around anyone who's pregnant, you know you immediately get skittish about cat feces, cat bedding, cat everything, because it could carry Toxo. And you do not want to get Toxoplasma into a fetal nervous system. It's a disaster."
"There's a long-standing literature that absolutely shows there's a statistical link between Toxo infection and schizophrenia. It's not a big link, but it's solidly there. Schizophrenics have higher than expected rates of having been infected with Toxo, and not particularly the case for other related parasites. Links between schizophrenia and mothers who had house cats during pregnancy."
https://aapos.org/client_data/files/2015/1230_fig2congenital...
Is the parasite dormant when it settles itself after infection? i.e. when you've been infected in the past, there is no risk to the baby, but if you're exposed to it again you can infect the baby?
(Source: I read a lot. Could be wrong! Don't think I am.)
And it won't kill all T. Gondii, it will remain latent inside your body.
There were some studied, few years ago, about combining pyrimethamine and aminoacids to kill the latent toxo, but I didn't find the results, if it even worked or not.
For almost everybody, infection will go away without signs. For few others, it will make you remember it for the rest of your life.
The research team found that 22 percent of the people with IED tested positive for toxoplasmosis exposure, compared with only 9 percent of the healthy control group. About 16 percent of the group with other psychiatric disorders tested positive for toxoplasmosis, too.
So the people with IED had about the same rate of infection as the general population. This looks to me like one of those "nothing to see here" situations based on the numbers.
If the 9% healthy and 22% with IED are both accurate (and the 20% number is the one that's off), then there may in fact be something to see here.
Anecdotally I see mentally ill people as being drawn to cat ownership for their personal comfort and fascination. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Wain
It is a difficult leap to go from saying "people with certain mental illnesses own cats, and thus are likely to have TP" to "TP causes mental illness".
If we are to believe cat owners are more likely to have mental illness, a correlation of mental illness and TP serum positivity follows naturally.
However, someone used it to show no associations between psychotic episodes (specifically) AFTER controlling for other factors (that are associated with cat ownership)[2].
Using the adjustments they made, I could wildly speculate that possibly dog owners will be less likely than cat owners to have mental illness, because dogs require a certain amount of wealth, living space, etc - and the lack of these things is associated both with cat ownership and mental illness, maybe, just not in rural areas...
[1]http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/researchers/access/ [2]https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/psychological-medici...
[1] It's still only a small amount. You can actually buy lithium water on Amazon with orders of magnitude more lithium, but that seems unwise....
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_and_crime_hypothesis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3x3TMdkGdQ
He touches on some very interesting observations that have been made about the infection and behavior.
But why? Most cats who catch it are asymptomatic....
though the headline does not emphasize it, there's an OCD correlation too.
Their experience is that the general commercial products are the safest to use - all the organic small scale farmed stuff sold to the general public is highly hit and miss, sometimes they're less contaminated but quite often it's literally off the charts e.g. hundredfold exceeding the limits allowed for commercial products, or have all kinds of dangerous bacteria (indicating e.g. fecal contamination) that they've never seen in samples of the mass produced food. Also, things their relatives have grown not for sale but for themselves with the purest intent have sometimes been contaminated - e.g. some parasites in their pork.
TL;DR - home-grown stuff can be expected to be less healthy and more dangerous than the industrial farming processes in well regulated first world countries. Often more tasty, though.