Recent years, the incidence of mental health problems is rising quickly throughout the world. People with these disorders are often subjected to poor quality of life. Such as schizophrenia, it is the fourth leading cause of disability in the developed world. The overall U.S. 2002 cost of schizophrenia estimated to be $62.7 billion. Therefore, that find an effective, safe and cheap therapeutic approach to deal with this problem, is not only important for individuals but for whole society by lowering the cost on medical care. This is the main topic in this article.
Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) dynamic scan has made clear that mental disorder is not only a psychological problem but also a physical problem with abnormality or atrophy in brain. Anti-psychotic drugs can control the symptoms such as hallucination, acousma and mania effectively, but it cannot control the atrophy that engulfs the brain continuously, and make some patients unable return to society due to constant status of emotionless and behavior abnormally.
Many studies showed that human’s nerve cell could regenerate again. Powerful evidence is Terry Wallis, who has been in coma since a car accident in 1984, has regained consciousness and cognitive abilities such as his speech in 2003. By MRI scans on Wallis's brain over a span of 18 months, found growth of new neural processes in the part of the brain that controls movement.
A psychotic young man who was
more than 10 years maintained by 20 mg Zyprexa daily. He was
emotionless, did nothing besides eating and sleeping. It was that I prepared Chinese
herbal medicine to have called back his emotion in days and made him went to
school willingly in month later.
The fact proved that Chinese drug can restore atrophied brain quickly and make disordered brain work as well as before, it is as easy as to treat a common disease. No doubt, a brand new therapeutic avenue emerged for those psychotic or other mental diseases sufferers.
Recent years, scientists have learnt more clearly about human brain structure and work mechanism. Our brain is an extraordinarily complex organ that is made up of many different structures. More evidences have showed that various mental disorders are connected with abnormality or atrophy in brain. For instance:
Autism is a developmental disorder that is characterized by impaired development in communication, social interaction and behavior.
“The idiopathic autistic syndrome is related to a dysfunction of both left and right superior temporal regions” [1]. “Both the hippocampus and amygdala there are nerve cells, which appear to be immature and which have not migrated to their proper destination in the brains” [2]. “Discovery of the etiologies underlying cerebellar maldevelopment may be the key to uncovering some of the causes of infantile autism” [3].
“Depressive patients often show neuropsychological deficits in executive functions such as lack of concentration, attention deficits, mood- congruent memory biases and lack of motivation, all impacting directly on cognitive performance. Main affective symptoms are negative mood states, anxiety symptoms or a pervasive lack of positive affect.”
Many researches have made clear that heavy atrophy has occurred in the brain of psychotics.
The best research job did by Paul M. Thompson’s team In University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Over a span of five-years, they did MRI scans for the brains of 12 teenagers diagnosed with schizophrenia and 12 mental healthy teens. They found that even those who took anti-psychotic medicine, the loss of gray matter with schizophrenia was much greater than that of healthy teens.
“To detect earlier loss, we compared gray matter profiles across all 24 subjects at their first scan and at their last scan 4.6 years later. Two striking features emerged. First, the severe progressive lateral temporal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deficit observed later was not apparent at age 13, even at a mean of 3 years after the onset of psychotic symptoms. These deficits, which are characteristic of adult and childhood schizophrenia, were severely progressive after illness onset (on average 5% lateral temporal attrition per year) but were absent in the early phase of the disease. In evaluating the power of the approach, we would have been likely to detect an early temporal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deficit, if present, but the near identity (to within 0-1%) of average normal and patient gray matter distribution at first scan, combined with the high rate of progression and significant deficit observed late, jointly suggest that the process of temporal and prefrontal gray matter attrition is a later developmental event. Second, parietal and motor cortices showed a severe early deficit (up to 20% loss; P < 0.0005) with diffuse loss in other (but not temporal) cortical regions. This early (prepubertal) parietal deficit is consistent with the faster parietal loss found in younger patients, whereas the dynamics of loss in other regions is more uniform with age. The initial parietal deficit, which is also progressive, also occurs in regions where normal adolescents lose gray matter, although in disease this loss process is significantly accelerated. Although it is unclear whether the normal and aberrant processes have a similar mechanism or are independent, the parietal and motor cortical deficits are progressive and are the earliest to develop. We recently found that the parietal regions, specifically, are also in deficit in adult patients relative to genetically identical controls (their monozygotic discordant twins). This finding indicates that environmental and not purely genetic factors are implicated in triggering this deficit, at least in adults. In the present study, a dynamic wave of progression from parietal cortices occurs later, into superior frontal, dorsolateral prefrontal, and temporal cortices (including superior temporal gyri). These regions comprise a specific band of cortical territory in which adult deficits are thought to be strongly influenced by genetic factors, as deficits here (i) are found in unaffected relatives and (ii) significantly covary with an individual's degree of genetic affinity to a patient. In our adolescent cohort, the temporal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex deficits were among the most severe but began in late adolescence and were observed only after symptom onset.”
“Patients with chronic schizophrenia displayed bilateral hippocampal volume reduction. Patients with first-episode schizophrenia but not schizophreniform psychosis displayed left hippocampal volume reduction.”
“Despite having intact performance in word recognition, the patients with schizophrenia had less activation of the right dorsolateral and anterior prefrontal cortex, right anterior cingulate, and left lateral temporal cortex during word encoding, compared with the healthy comparison subjects. During word recognition, the patients had impairments in activation of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral temporal cortices”.
“Researchers from Washington University in St. Louis has used advanced brain imaging techniques to show that remembering the past and envisioning the future may go hand-in-hand, with each process sparking strikingly similar patterns of activity within precisely the same broad network of brain regions.”
“Comparing images of brain activity in response to the "self-remember" and "self-future" event cues, researchers found a surprisingly complete overlap among regions of the brain used for remembering the past and those used for envisioning the future – every region involved in recollecting the past was also used in envisioning the future.”
"Our findings provide compelling support for the idea that memory and future thought are highly interrelated and help explain why future thought may be impossible without memories."
“Elizabeth Gould at Princeton University found that sleep deprivation in rats inhibits the replication of neural stem cells and therefore prevents creation of new neurons.”
“Professor Gould thinks that the lack of sleep produces the stress hormone glucocorticoid which suppresses neurogenesis.”
“In a recent study by psychology professor Elizabeth Gould, rats who were sleep-deprived for 72 hours exhibited increased levels of the stress hormone glucocorticoid. These high stress levels in turn reduced neurogenesis — the birth of new neurons — in the rats' hippocampuses, a part of the brain critical for learning and memory.”
“Harvard Medical School researcher Seung-Schik Yoo asked a human group to stay up all night and then showed them images. People who stayed up all night did not remember the images as well as those who were well rested when they saw the images.”
“They correctly identified 74% of the previously viewed images, on average. By comparison, another group who had a proper night’s rest before viewing the 150 images at the start of the experiment correctly identified 86% of these pictures in the pop quiz.”
2.4.3. Without required sleep will cause trouble in remembering
“The human body requires a minimum amount of sleep per day just to function properly. That amount of sleep can vary per person according to age and other factors.The side effect of insomnia will disrupt your normal sleeping pattern and cause havoc to your body. Without the required sleep needed to function, you will have trouble concentrating or remembering everyday tasks that are normally very simple. Trying to pay attention and focus on what someone is saying, can be a chore. Often times another side effect of insomnia is being very irritable. Little things that normally don't bother you, can now escalate into something gigantic. You may explode over something that isn't even a big deal. You feel badly about your actions, but just can't seem to control them.”
“According to a research abstract that will be presented on Wednesday, June 10, at SLEEP 2009, the 23rd Annual Meeting of the Associated Professional Sleep Societies, people with chronic stress report shorter sleep duration, worse sleep quality, and more daytime functioning impairments. Conversely, daytime functioning impairments and shorter sleep duration demonstrated a predictive relationship with habitual stress complaints.”
Stress, to put it bluntly, is bad for you. It can kill you, in fact. A study reveals that stress causes deterioration in everything from your gums to your heart and can make you more susceptible to everything from the common cold to cancer. Thanks to new research crossing the disciplines of psychology, medicine, neuroscience, and genetics, the mechanisms underlying the connection are rapidly becoming understood.
Hopes are the rain and sunshine for the blossom of the soul flower. Without hopes, workers will not continue to work; farmers will not continue to farm……
The most people are busy gladly, because healthy brain generates hopes for them. These hopes are the driving force for their striving to work hardly. On the contrary, if the brain can not generate the hopes the people would lose the life target and falling into depression, even psychosis.
Therefore the generation of hopes is the essential for health mentally. Then what kind of factors would affect the generation of hopes?
The most sleeping problems are psychological problems. That the stressful situations induced psychological stress and gradually or suddenly impair the sufferer’s sleeping, and then appetite, digestion, metabolism, nutrients supply and immune defense system. As a consequence, mental disorder is generated. In fact, it is main onset process of a lot of other diseases (1, 2, 3), too.
Institute of Psychiatry, University of London has been tracking 160 identical twins. Among them, Sean was ill and his older brother Stephen kept in health, both showed in a documentary of US Discovery Channel, namely Schizophrenia Stolen Lives Stolen Minds.
They had enjoyed their happy boyhood together. Sean’s talent had let him enter an England top art school. At 20, he was designing an award winning logo for a prestige Graphics Design Company in London, Britain. It was schizophrenia that made his mind and his life collapsed.
For being identical twins, Sean and Stephen have same Gene and brain. However, only Sean was ill. So it must have some difference between the brothers non-physically. We can easily find the difference from Sean’s talks. That was the challenging job that gave Sean stress, such as task deadline. This is the main source of the psychological stress and the possible psychotic inducement for Sean’s ill.
Inasmuch as the most of psychotics are the gifted youth and stress played an important role on their pathogenesis (1, 2, 3), we should seek the psychotic inducement from the differences between the genius brain and normal brain.
The obvious difference is the thinking speed between the genius brain and the normal brain. The first one is much faster than that of second one. It just likes the work efficiency of the CPU in computer, that the Intel 80686 is much faster than the Intel 80286 when processing the same tasks.
Everything has two sides, while the gifted kids enjoy their talent and outstanding, they were also threatened by the potential negative effect, which is under the same psychological stress that the negative impact is stronger for them than that of normal one, and the impairment on brain is heavier for them than that of the normal one. These may damage the normal way of the brain's thinking and cause mental disorders.
On other hand, the untalented youth are rare to take challenging tasks; therefore, they have lesser chance to suffer heavy psychological stress.
Sean said, if he does not take the medicine he might be locked. He strongly hopes to return to normal. His older brother Stephen’s life was affected deeply, too. He has lost his job at the time when Sean’s starting onset of schizophrenia and has been accompanying ill Sean. Stephen worried very much about that he has high chance to get the same illness as his younger brother’s.
They are the common representative for the psychotic sufferers and families. We should help them get out of the sad situation as soon as possible.
Antipsychotic Drugs: currently the dominant antipsychotic approaches are the atypical antipsychotic drugs. The best one is Zyprexa. It mediates through a combination of dopamine and serotonin type 2 (5HT2) antagonism to control the symptom such as hallucination, acousma, and mania effectively. However, it cannot control the brain atrophy continuously. Make the most patients keep in sleepy, emotionless and behavior abnormally. So the patients cannot go back to society.
Orthomolecular medicine: it conceptualized by double Nobel laureate, Linus Pauling in his paper Orthomolecular Psychiatry of 1967. That is the practice of optimizing health and treating disease by providing correct amounts of vitamins, minerals, amino acids, enzymes, essential fatty acids and other substances which are natural to the body’s environment.
As a well-known chemists, Linus Pauling had wrote a book the Nature of Chemical Bond and researched into the structures of proteins and DAN. He had coined the molecular disease. I think that the Orthomolecular was derived from his outstanding researches, and Linus Pauling was the unique person who could deeply understand the nature of lives, because that interdisciplinary studies of chemical and life sciences made him understood how the chemical bonds join the atoms together to form a life and what the essential condition to keep the life healthy is.
In the early 20th century, some doctors hypothesized that vitamins could cure disease, and supplements were prescribed by megadoses in the 1930s. In the early 1950s, a few psychiatrists began adding massive doses of nutrients to their treatment of severe mental problems. The original substance was vitamin B3 (nicotinic acid or nicotinamide), and the therapy was termed "megavitamin therapy." Later the treatment regimen was expanded to include other vitamins, minerals, hormones, and diets, any of which may be combined with conventional drug therapy and electroshock treatments. A few hundred physicians now use this approach to treat a variety of conditions, both mental and physical.
When I searched back the filiations of Orthomolecular, found that Canada was the cradle place. And Abram Hoffer, a Canadian Psychiatrist, played a very important role in development of the theory of Orthomolecular Medicine.
Nowadays, the Vitamins, Minerals and other dietary supplements are easy to buy from shops or pharmacies that are locating anywhere world widely. It showed the success of Orthomolecular Medicine.
5. A psychotic with 10 years ill history cured by Chinese drugs
5.1. Case description and treatment
A male in his 35, onset schizophrenia at 17, cured in short time. After finishing 2 years high school, 4 years university and 2 years work, he recrudesced and lived in the nursing home about 10 years. Maintained by 20 mg Zyprexa and slept 15-16 hours daily. Some times he went out, did not come back.
April 2003, I met him and his father. At that time, his father has taken him out of nursing home for a couple of months, since the father has retired. When I said something to the son, he answered "no, no" in mandarin and went backward. I was surprised by his response and stared at the father with wondering.
The father introduced some symptoms of his son in despair: don’t laugh, don’t cry, don’t watch TV, don’t listen to music, don’t take a bath and don’t brush teeth -- do nothing beside eating and sleeping. He worried that nobody would take care of his son after his leaving this world. I told the father that Chinese drug (natural herbal preparation) can help his son, and I can prepare and donate this kind of drug. The father accepted my advice with suspected expression.
I knew that he was not fully confident of my drug, because he did not found any recovered case by constantly information searching. However, he knew that Chinese drug is safe and also he has been tormented by desperation for his son’s treatment. He was just like a person in deep water hoping rescue -- even a piece of floating straw would be taken as a life-saving hope.
I supervised the father daily by telephone. In the first 2 days, the son slept heavier, increased nearly 2 hours than that of before, and then decreased day by day, after a week, slept 10-11 hours daily. The surprising is that his emotion came back again after taking my drug only several days. He showed himself as a normal person. Talk, laugh, watch TV, listen to music, and do some housework willingly.
About 1 month later, the father phoned me with happiness: "your drug is wonderful, recently my son always ask me the meaning of English words those he saw on the tools or on the wall along street." His son could search English words meaning by electronic dictionary installed on computer, which he showed his son how to use once only. More surprising was that his son knew more English words than those of he ever told. His son has recalled some English words that he had studied in high school and university. The father also asked me to help him, because his son wanted to open the computer to see the secret inside.
For a trial, I suggested sending him for shopping vegetable and fruit, meanwhile, to check some item's price. He did successfully.
After 2 months, the son wanted to know more new things eagerly. The father was bored by son's endless questions. I suggested that send his son to study English in school. The purpose was for further therapy psychologically from contacting other people. Meanwhile that will improve his communicating ability in English and prepare to get his life back on track in society to enjoy his young life. He had his son registered in English school.
At first 2 weeks, the father accompanied his son to go to school, and then the son went to school alone every day happily.
In addition, on my request, the father had his son's blood tested and the results were good, also lowered the dose of Zyprexa from 20mg to 15mg daily. I think that Zyprexa should be decreased gradually, otherwise may harm the son’s health.
Although no one checked the son's brain until now, but his behavior has told us that his brain was atrophied before and was restored after taking herbal medicine. So his behavior improved from abnormal to normal, inactive to active, from doing nothing to doing some housework and studying English in school.
If we could scan his brain by MRI, we would see the brain growth day by day. Dream came true. A miracle was created.
Powerful evidence is Terry Wallis, who has been in coma since a car accident in 1984, has regained consciousness and cognitive abilities such as his speech in 2003. By MRI scans on Wallis's brain over a span of 18 months, found growth of new neural processes in the part of the brain that controls movement.
Chinese medicine improved the psychotic symptom in short time, showed it has strong therapeutic effect for the regeneration of brain cell and make atrophied brain being restored quickly.
In above herbal preparation, every component was used for a long time in China. Some were last hundreds years, some even thousands years. No side effects were reported. It is safe not only in dose (large or small) but also in taking term (longer or shorter), which was proven by the researches of modern pharmacological and long time massive application clinically.
Modern biology studies have shown that compound preparation with dozens of Chinese drugs can reduce the negative effects of psychological stress largely, because it can alleviate the stress symptoms by releasing endorphins, decreasing the stress hormone cortisol, eliminating the oxygen free radicals, lowering the blood pressure, reducing the heart rate, relaxing the muscle tissue, improving the digestion, improving the sleep and relieving the psychotic symptoms. More important is that it can take the vasodilator effect to improve the macro- and micro-circulation, and thereby accelerate the restoration of the atrophied brain by enhanced supply of oxygen and nutrition.
Chinese drugs can relieve the side effects of anti-psychotic drugs. Improve the medication compliance, life quality, and help patients recover early.
Chinese drugs are not only having the all ingredients of the Orthomolecular medicine also having many unique medicinal constituents that are similar to the Western drugs in therapeutic effect with lesser side effect.
Psychotic is a disease that is sensitive to the psychological stress, some can recover without therapy when the psychological stress was relieved and some can recover by taking placebo. So it is hard to say the effect of any drug. I think that the best way to examine a drug whether effective is to treat a patient who is in the psychotic symptom at least more than one year and mental retarded, just like above young man that have lasted 10 years in psychotic status. It is long enough for proving the positive effect of Chinese drug.
The misfortune is that the most of psychotic are gifted youth. We can imagine how their parents were struck psychologically when their beloved children were diagnosed as psychotic. Their child was fostered by a lot of effort with putting a lots hope that parents were unable realized. But now, their beloved-kid is just like when a baby bird’s outspreading its wing toward the immense air, the wings were suddenly broken helplessly. Also just like a bud protruded its head against the soil barely, was struck by hailstone storm. For a family it is the most tragic experience.
In fact, among the fruits of human civilization that we have been enjoying, some were invented by psychotic brains. Chinese medicine can restore the damaged genius’ brains and make them continue to exert their talent. It will be a great contribution to the development of human civilization.
The above case is an example that demonstrated the amazing therapeutic effect of Chinese drug, which also demonstrated that I’m proficient in using Chinese drug. Although it is only one case, however the young man was in psychotic lasting ten years, and had heavy retarded mentally. His specific situation is sufficient enough to rule out the possibility of any other therapeutic factors besides Chinese drug.
I have strong confidence to help more psychotics recover as well as before by Chinese drug, and send the happiness back to their families. Also I can clone the case to other diseases, with changing ingredients of compound preparation according to patient’s specific symptoms.
A. I’ve learnt more about Chinese medicine associated with various diseases, which came from more than 37 years studying constantly. I have accumulated nearly 4 Gb data related with TCM, include royal court secret recipe, patent documents, clinical trial papers that published on professional magazine and some new research results in modern biochemistry.
B. For each Chinese drug to be used, I’ve made clear their bioactive constituents, positive effect, negative effect and integrating effect when they were used together. Most above information cannot be gotten from traditional books in TCM, but can only get from new research results with modern biochemical and pharmacological means. Also this is why the old practitioners in TCM could not treat disease quickly and accurately. Even for a general illness that the prescription needs to be adjusted from time to time.
C. Take the advantages of compound prescription of TCM, treat patient on different symptom at the same time by putting different Chinese drug together to enhance each other’s therapeutic effects, eliminate each other’s side effects.
D. Chinese drug can supply some essential nutrients for patients. The vitamins and minerals are important nutrients, especially for patients whose digestion ability was lowered by suffering illness.
Also Chinese drug is very cheap, $60- $70 US dollar /month is enough. It is important not only for the family of patient but also for the government to reduce the budget on medication largely.
For a long time, psychiatric patients have been mistreated. Their plight is unbearable. Some were handcuffed and held in jail until death, some even has been burned alive. It is sad enough that make any people grieved. Those facts are clearly described in the documentary. Abram Hoffer, a well-known psychiatrist, in his book <Vitamin B3 and Schizophrenia: Discovery, Recovery, Controversy>, had described the sad sufferings of psychotic patients in the middle age of last century. In a hospital, their living situation is like prisoners in jail. This is his motivation for lifelong to research and rescue schizophrenia.
I am sure that Sean’s emotion can be restored in days and make him act as well as before in weeks. Then his brain will be recovered similar to his brother’s in volume. It is easy to be proven by the improvement of his behavior and the brain MRI scan. Also we can help the brothers in job, even in marriage. Help them to return to society as a taxpayer and continue to enjoy their colorful lives.
The successful cases can help people to build up the new consensus that schizophrenia is not a refractory disease, it can be easy cured in short time, to instead current consensus that it can not be cured in short time, even life long, which was clearly described sadly by many leading psychiatric experts in the documentary.
The new consensus will amend the negative views on mental disorder. The psychotic symptom is a clear sign of a talented brain. They can exert their talent and contribute to society again. Patients and their families should feel proud of having a talented brain instead of worrying about the damage to reputation thereby evading from society. These worries have very bad effect on the recovery and the normal life of psychotic sufferers and their families.
However, we should bear in mind that it was God bestowed the talented brain as a gift to a family and all mankind, to help speed up the human civilization, so it must be cared and treated as priceless sophisticated instruments. Especially for the adolescent, that the brain is very fragile during their rapid developing period.
How to maintain and use the gifted brain scientifically will be a very meaningful task.
I think, for those adolescents from 16 to 25 years old, which is the period of high incidence of mental disorder, Chinese medicine could take as prevention approach. That is when they facing some foreseen psychological pressure, such as examination, competing, etc., could take some sleeping or digestion drugs ahead as prevention to reduce the incidence.
I am sure that the most of them could be cured and go back to society to enjoy their colorful life as a taxpayer.
Glossary - MCM (Modern Chinese medicine) is the new research results on TCM (Traditional Chinese medicine) by modern biochemical and pharmacological techniques emulating the clinical trials methods used in Western medicine.
In TCM, there are no concepts of the bioactive constituents and no any terms were associated with modern anatomy, biology and pharmacology, because its theory formed thousand years ago, at that time, has no any modern scientific buds at all, so it never check and consider the bioactive constituents for any medicinal materials being used. Therefore, there is somewhat blindness in drugs using. In addition, the general process method of Chinese drugs is boiling, and then drinks the soup. This method cannot control the amount of medicinal constituents being boiled out from the medicinal slices, so that it cannot accurately control the medicinal concentration of the soup and thereby affect the intake dosage. Moreover, some bioactive volatile constituents would lose by volatilizing during boiling. Because of those indeterminable and uncontrollable factors, the therapeutic efficacy has somewhat uncertainty, too, so that TCM practitioners need to continually re-diagnosis and re-adjust the formula for the same patient.
My strength is that, in more than 30 years I have been continuously studying the Chinese medicine especially focusing on new research results of Chinese drugs by the means of modern biochemical and pharmacological emulating the research method of WM. For Chinese drugs being often used, especially for those I am going to use, I knew the exact bioactive constituents and their pharmacological effects - positive, negative, dose, etc. Therefore, I can correctly select the medicinal ingredients and accurately control the intake dose focusing on each symptoms of the diseases according to the principle of compound prescription of TCM with the medicinal extracts in the forms of Tablets or Injections. The therapeutic effect and outcome are under well controlled.
Recent years, Chinese medicine has been gaining popular, but has been slow. This mainly caused by the unique nature of its medical terms, theory and philosophy, because of they are completely different with the WM, making it hard to be understood by those in WM background, even for most Chinese people. So promoting the massive application of CM is to carry out the work of translating and integrating with modern biochemistry and pharmacology. On this purpose, I have written some articles to introduce the theory and magical effect of Chinese drugs in English by the terms of WM. Some listed here:
Now I can prepare many compound Chinese drugs with special therapeutic effect according to the symptoms of diseases. Some curative effects have proven by practical use in my relatives and friends.
I have worked as a researcher for nearly 2 decades. I feel that promoting the public application of existing mature technologies is very significant, because there are many scientific-research results lay idle to cause a big waste of valuable social resources. Some of them are very good products with commercial value that will gain more by spending less. Among the existing mature technologies, Chinese medicine is the best one.
I am looking for co-partner to manufacture and market Chinese medicinal products according to my knowledge and experience.
I’d like to co-operate with some researchers to make clinical trial with Chinese drug for the Schizophrenia, and other diseases, get a significant improvement for the patients in one or two weeks, just like that of young man in the above case. Then we can make suitable drug with marketing purpose.
In order to relieve the doubt from patients and their family, I’d like to make a trial in advance; take 50% more than that of patient’s is going to take, to examine the potential poison of Chinese medicine that will be used.
If it is needed that I‘d like to sign an agreements with patient’s families and researchers to differentiate the responsibility legally.
The success of recovering schizophrenia will open the door to treat various other diseases by Chinese drug widely. And more successful case will help us to carry out our plan easier.
New research has emerged that reveals a specific brain network - that is the last to develop and the first to show signs of neurodegeneration - is more vulnerable to unhealthy aging as well as to disorders that emerge in young people, shedding light on conditions such as Alzheimer's disease and schizophrenia.
Grey matter in the brain - a network of nerve cells that coordinate information from different senses - develops last and degenerates first, shedding light on Alzheimer's and schizophrenia, researchers say.
The researchers - led by Dr. Gwena?lle Douaud at the Oxford University Functional MRI of the Brain (FMRIB) Centre in the UK - say their work sheds light on potential genetic and environmental factors that may occur early in life, causing lifelong consequences.
They publish their findings in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The team focused on grey matter in the brain - a network of nerve cells that coordinate information from different senses.
This area does not develop until late adolescence or early adulthood, they say, and it is linked with both intellectual capacity and long-term memory - mental abilities that become impaired in people with schizophrenia or Alzheimer's disease.
A theory from the 1880s - known as the "retrogenesis" theory of brain change - proposed that brain ability declines in reverse order to how it develops in humans and in evolutionary terms (for example, humans and chimpanzees evolving from a common ancestor).
Following these lines, the researchers used a "data-driven" approach to study age-related changes. So, instead of looking for a certain pattern in brain changes in a specific brain location, the team analyzed magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans of 484 people - ranging in age from 8-85 years - to see what patterns were revealed.
Specific brain regions 'develop more slowly and degenerate faster'
The team explains that theirs is the first study to demonstrate the "retrogenesis" theory in grey matter on a large scale by using image analysis techniques.
Results from their imaging data showed that a particular network within the grey matter links most higher order regions of the brain. Additionally, they found that this network develops later than the rest of the brain and degenerates first in older age.
Though the finding that grey matter declines with age is not new, the team says their study showed how one specific network was more vulnerable to age-related neurodegeneration, in that it degenerated sooner than other brain areas.
What is more, the team compared this brain network in healthy individuals with those of people with Alzheimer's andschizophrenia, and found that these brain areas likely play an important role in the two very different conditions.
Commenting on their findings, Dr. Douaud says:
?"Our results show that the same specific parts of the brain not only develop more slowly, but also degenerate faster than other parts. These complex regions, which combine information coming from various senses, seem to be more vulnerable than the rest of the brain to both schizophrenia and Alzheimer's, even though these two diseases have different origins and appear at very different, almost opposite, times of life."
'Results reconcile two historical hypotheses'
The researchers point to previous research that has shown these regions of the brain are not as developed in chimpanzees and other primates. Because these animals do not appear to experience schizophrenia or Alzheimer's, scientists have suggested humans' evolved brains and extended lifespans are to blame.
"These results, which might seem surprising at first, are really exciting as they actually reconcile two historical hypotheses - until now presented completely separately in the scientific literature - that the brain damage observed in Alzheimer's and schizophrenia is related to these higher order regions of the brain," says Dr. Douaud.
Prof. Hugh Perry - chairman of the Medical Research Council's Neurosciences and Mental Health Board, which funded the research - notes that long ago, doctors referred to schizophrenia as "premature dementia." Until this study, however, there has not been any evidence that the same parts of the brain could be "associated with two such different diseases."
He says the study "raises important issues about possible genetic and environmental factors that may occur in early life and then have lifelong consequences," and adds:
"The more we can find out about these very difficult disorders, the closer we will come to helping sufferers and their families."
