..microbiota from drug-free patients with schizophrenia causes [..] abnormal behaviors & dysregulated kynurenine metabolism in mice, 2019, Ma et al

Full title: Transplantation of microbiota from drug-free patients with schizophrenia causes schizophrenia-like abnormal behaviors and dysregulated kynurenine metabolism in mice

Paywall, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-019-0475-4
Sci hub, https://sci-hub.se/10.1038/s41380-019-0475-4

 

Well, hello there.

Would be great it unrelated research expands on areas of research relevant to ME.

 

how do they know if a mouse has schizophrenia or any other brain disorder even with autopsies , edited to add all sociable creatures have their own personalities.

 

And how do they know that a mouse who has a completely different diet to a human, isn’t behaving differently because of other factors?

This is an interesting observation at best and not a serious scientific study ....clearly jumping on a populist bandwagon with a poorly constructed hypothesis that is impossible to prove from the outset given how little we know.

I hardly think 60 species difference is significant when we are dealing with thousands of species and strains that seem to have a broad range within the healthy (mostly dependent upon us eating a diverse diet).

We should just keep these disciplines separate...the “experts” in this field would not be making such claims yet given how little we know. All this dabbling around in poo has really started to rub off on the quality of some papers.

 

Biggest flaw by far.

Unfortunately all this means is it changes behavior in ways that are somewhat quantifiable, maybe. Is the change even remotely similar to schizophrenia? Given mounting evidence that most psychiatric diagnoses are so imprecise as to be virtually useless, I guess it's about as good as most diagnoses of dysfunctional behavior.

 

They need a control group of mice receiving a fecal microbiota transplant from non-schizophrenic humans.

 

I think they did that, but haven’t read the full paper. See this comment from the abstract:
“compared with their counterparts receiving feces from healthy controls.“