[MrAbbott]

Hi. Maybe you've heard it before, but both psychosis and the pills to treat it (anti-psychotics) can slowly deteriorate our brain cells (check this article and look for illness and drugs):


List Of Things That Kill Brain Cells: The Death of Neurons - Mental Health Daily

I'm not hypochondriac, but my doctor never tells me these things... I believe I should know. I consulted him about this last time I saw him but he reassured me I have nothing to fear. Did you know about this, and more importantly, do you agree?

Peace .

[TheGal]

I AM a hypochondriac at times... haha

It's quite possible that the meds cause some reduction in brain cells (although I haven't read the article about antipsychotics), the alternative which is having psychosis is terrifying to me. I read somewhere that not keeping up with antipsychotic treatment and suffering repeated episodes of psychosis is damaging to the brain as well.

I think there's a lot that the doctors don't know, to be frank.

All I know is I wish to remain stable, so I take my meds and hope for the best.

[Soupe du jour]

You may want to talk to your psychiatrist about this issue. "Mental Health Daily" appears to be a blog written by a person with a mental illness. Not a real scientific source of information, such as Mayo Clinic, or the like. Their nature.com source reference doesn't even go to an active page.

[Yaowen]

My personal opinion and I could be wrong is that the article is generally good. It seems well balanced, fair minded and it is nice that it provide some links.

One thing that, I believe, might have helped the article would have been something concerning the limitations of the medical research listed.

This kind of thing is generally found in scholarly articles but sometimes lacking in articles for the general public. Sadly, scholarly articles often require one to pay for the right to read them and ordinary folks often don't have the resources to spend money for this kind of thing.

When I mention limitations I mean that all medical research has limitations: size of sample or study, duration of study, quality of study, confounding factors and new discoveries. A double blind placebo controlled study is one of the gold standards of medical research.

It often matters if a study is following 100 people for a year or if a study is following 10,000 people for ten years. It often matters if a study rests of what people report about their own behavior since people are sometimes not open about everything.

These are internal limitations to medical research. And there are more.

But there are also external limitations to medical research. Publishers are often very interested in publishing research reaching exciting conclusions. So there is often pressure on researchers to give the publishers what they want. Otherwise, they will not get published. Luckily outright dishonest is fairly rare. But it is often common for researchers to kind of play up certain statistics while downplaying others, a practice called "slicing and dicing."

Another external limitation on research is when there are conflicting results from different research looking at the same issues. 10 different research studies might arrive at three different conclusions. Sometimes it is the shocking conclusion that gets published since the public is interested in novelty and news.

Types of study also influence results. Take the brain. Is a study done on a human brain post mortem? Are brain cells looked at in a test tube or under a microscope. There are others. Were the tests done on the brain cells of mice, rats, dogs or monkeys and then the results extrapolated to human brain cells.

Some studies look for correlations between data sets. And this can be a tricky situation.

Here is a crude example. There is a statistical correlation between the amount of ice cream eaten over the years and the number of deaths by drowning. It looks on a statistical graph as though the more ice cream people eat, the more people drown.

But the statistics are misleading because they omit important data. It is not that eating ice cream causes drowning to increase. It is that as the weather warms up, people both tend to eat more ice cream and go out swimming more. And when people swim more there are more drownings. The drownings are not caused by ice cream consumption.

This is the case of a lurking variable skewing data. Sometimes a statistician misses data. Sometimes he excludes data for honest or perhaps less noble reasons.

Sometimes data is sliced and diced because the researcher has an ulterior motive: getting published, effecting political or social change and so on.

The quality of research can affect its objectivity and usefulness. A recent study I read noted that consuming a certain product caused cell damage. I looked for the original research. Most of it was done in test tubes.

And it turned out that cell damage happened due to consumption of large quantities of the product. Apparently, one would have to drink 800 bottles of this beverage a day for years to cause cell damage.

Most people would never drink 800 bottles of this a day for years. So while it is true that the product can cause cell damage, it is not necessarily a terrible threat to public health at this point.

This are some of things meant by "study limitations."

Another one is "who is funding the research?" There are anti-medicine lobbies that fund research on the dangers of medicine.

There are pharmaceutical companies that fund research on the benefits of medicine. And it can be hard to sort out the "good reasons" from the "real reasons" for the research.

I'm sure you know all this already, so I am sorry if I am wasting your time. But others who may not know of such things may read this thread and it might helpful to these others to know how difficult it is to get the real truth-value of research results.

Please know that I am not saying that anything in the article you quoted is wrong. Since I am not a doctor with free subscriptions to medical research literature and because I am too poor to pay the high costs to read a lot of the research, which is guarded by pay walls, I cannot comment on the conclusions.

There is a principle of logic that inductive reasoning never reaches certainty. What this means is that it is very each to prove a universal statement false but impossible to prove a universal statement true, except perhaps in mathematics.

Example, if I say all stars behave in the same way, that is impossible to prove because I would have to examine every star in the universe. But if I say that all stars behave in the same way and you find even one that doesn't, my theory is proven false.

One of the purposes of science is to aid prediction. One wants a good theory or model in order to predict the future. Weather forecasts use models to predict what the weather will be like where you live.

But predicting the future is almost impossible because not only don't we know everything that is knowable, we don't even know what it is that we don't know.

In the horse and buggy days there was some research predicting a catastrophe due to the growing amount of horse manure. The catastrophe did not occur though because horse driven transportation was replaced by automobiles. Of course the scientists of that day could not predict something that had not been found or made yet.

Albert Einstein once said that practical use of atomic energy was impossible. He predicted not only that it wouldn't happen but he also predicted that it couldn't happen. But then chain reactions were discovered.

So in fallible opinion, I think we should take note of medical research but also try to get an idea of the studies in question, their limitations, other studies and so on if possible so we don't lose our balance. Know what I am trying to say here?

There are trade offs in medication use. You get something and you lose something. Sometimes we seem to be forced to decide whether the benefits outweigh the side effects and risks. Everyone has to decide for himself or herself based on the best evidence they can acquire. Perhaps I am wrong. I am often wrong about things. But that is my current opinion.

Hope you gets lots and lots of responses to your very interesting post!

[MrAbbott]

Originally Posted by Soupe du jour

You may want to talk to your psychiatrist about this issue. "Mental Health Daily" appears to be a blog written by a person with a mental illness. Not a real scientific source of information, such as Mayo Clinic, or the like. Their nature.com source reference doesn't even go to an active page.

I actually had a better page that quoted the same effect, but I don't seem to find the link. My doctor just says that psychotic episodes on their own would harm me much more, so just take the medicine, which is at low dosage at the moment (he dobles it when I'm psychotic).

Thanks

[MrAbbott]

Originally Posted by TheGal

I AM a hypochondriac at times... haha

It's quite possible that the meds cause some reduction in brain cells (although I haven't read the article about antipsychotics), the alternative which is having psychosis is terrifying to me. I read somewhere that not keeping up with antipsychotic treatment and suffering repeated episodes of psychosis is damaging to the brain as well.

I think there's a lot that the doctors don't know, to be frank.

All I know is I wish to remain stable, so I take my meds and hope for the best.

The time when I felt the rush and emotion of being both manic and psychotic is gone, so I perfectly understand your wish of being stable...

[TheGal]

Fabulous post, @Yaowen! Thank you! I really learned a lot and appreciate the way you explained the limitations of studies.


And yes, we don't know what we don't know.


Interesting thread, MrAbbott, I look forward to following it.

[Random 503]

Originally Posted by Yaowen

This kind of thing is generally found in scholarly articles but sometimes lacking in articles for the general public. Sadly, scholarly articles often require one to pay for the right to read them and ordinary folks often don't have the resources to spend money for this kind of thing.
!

Great post, Yaowen.

I do not condone nor suggest that anyone use any source that circumvents copyright law. However if you google the name below you may be surprised at what you find.

Alexandra Asanovna Elbakyan

[Tart Cherry Jam]

The Nature article this source quotes says, among other things:

However, whereas treatment with typical antipsychotics has been reported to lead to smaller volumes in certain cortical areas in subjects with schizophrenia (Dazzan et al, 2005; Lieberman et al, 2005), atypical antipsychotics might preserve cortical volume (Dazzan et al, 2005) or slow the rate of volume decreases (Lieberman et al, 2005). Thus, different antipsychotic medications might interact with the underlying disease process producing different patterns of change in cortical volume. Nevertheless, the findings of the current study at least raise the possibility that some previous reports of morphological and cellular alterations in the cerebral cortex of schizophrenia subjects might be confounded by the effects of chronic antipsychotic treatment.

Excellent post @Yaowen!