The possible role of Toxoplasma gondii in schizophrenia and other brain conditions goes front and center in the March issue of The Atlantic, where writer Kathleen McAuliffe profiles Czech scientist Jaroslav Flegr and his studies of how the parasite found in cat feces might affect the human brain and quotes two research scientists on the Treatment Advocacy Center board of directors at length.
An evolutionary biologist at Charles University in Prague, Flegr “believes that the organism contributes to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia,” McAuliffe reports in “How Your Cat is Making You Crazy.” “'When you add up all the different ways it can harm us,' says Flegr, 'Toxoplasma might even kill as many people as malaria, or at least a million people a year.'”
Studies of the role Toxo may play in causing schizophrenia have been ongoing for more than half a century, founder E. Fuller Torrey, MD, told McAuliffe, even though such studies are "not politically correct."
“There is strong psychological resistance to the possibility that human behavior can be influenced by some stupid parasite,” Flegr told The Atlantic. “Nobody likes to feel like a puppet.”
Another “more obvious reason for resistance” to the idea that T. gondii could be linked to schizophrenia and other neurological conditions, McAuliffe writes, is that “Flegr’s notions sound an awful lot like fringe science, right up there with UFO sightings and claims of dolphins telepathically communicating with humans.”
That said, after “years of being ignored or discounted,” he reports, researchers including “big names in neuroscience … think he could well be onto something.”
“Another academic heavyweight who takes Flegr seriously is the schizophrenia expert E. Fuller Torrey, director of the Stanley Medical Research Institute, in Maryland. ‘I admire Jaroslav for doing [this research],’ he says. ‘It’s obviously not politically correct, in the sense that not many labs are doing it. He’s done it mostly on his own, with very little support. I think it bears looking at. I find it completely credible.’”
Dr. Torrey is founder and a board member of the Treatment Advocacy Center, and the Stanley Medical Research Institute is our research affiliate. He told The Atlantic that about 70 epidemiology studies have explored a link between schizophrenia and T. gondii since the 1950s. He and Johns Hopkins University neurovirologist Robert Yolken – also a member of the Treatment Advocacy Center board of directors – studied a subset of these papers that met rigorous scientific standards and concluded, as Flegr has, that patients with Toxo are missing gray matter in an area of the brain associated with schizophrenia.
SMRI has funded several studies of T. gondii as a possible cause of schizophrenia. An extensive library of research is available from the Institute's website.
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