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Comment by thaumasiotes | Hacker News Reader

> but bonafide schizophrenia comes with gray matter changes seen over fMRI

According to who?

  https://psychiatryonline.org/doi/10.1176/appi.ajp.2008.07101562
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2213158216301000
  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0022395621005793

it wasn't hard to find these, they're like secondary cites in things like https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9706110/

These clearly state in the abstract that there is gray matter loss in differing stages of schizophrenia, however it is unclear if it is as a result of common medications or the disease itself. It doesn't indicate that you can scan a person without any other knowledge and diagnose them with the disease. Gray matter loss can happen for other reasons as well.

i wonder if that has anything to do with putting someone with paranoid delusions into a loud machine that you explicitly state is going to scan their brain? maybe that's why there's no good imaging studies prior to drug intervention?

further i am having a hard time coming up with medical conditions that have a single test pass/fail like this.

> further i am having a hard time coming up with medical conditions that have a single test pass/fail like this.

Famously, pregnancy...

Maybe, but I don't think most psychiatric patients are in a constant psychotic state that they would take such a strong stand on this. Maybe a few Ken Kesey characters depicted in a cartoonish manner.

But as the article mentions it's not a single pass/fail test they seek but any biological marker at all.

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