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Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes

Many genes have been implicated in schizophrenia as have viral prenatal or adult infections and toxoplasmosis or Lyme disease. Several autoantigens also target key pathology-related proteins. These factors are interrelated. Susceptibility genes encode for proteins homologous to those of the pathogen...

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Autor principal: Carter, C. J.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research 2011
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335463/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22567321
http://dx.doi.org/10.4061/2011/128318
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author Carter, C. J.
author_facet Carter, C. J.
author_sort Carter, C. J.
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description Many genes have been implicated in schizophrenia as have viral prenatal or adult infections and toxoplasmosis or Lyme disease. Several autoantigens also target key pathology-related proteins. These factors are interrelated. Susceptibility genes encode for proteins homologous to those of the pathogens while the autoantigens are homologous to pathogens' proteins, suggesting that the risk-promoting effects of genes and risk factors are conditional upon each other, and dependent upon protein matching between pathogen and susceptibility gene products. Pathogens' proteins may act as dummy ligands, decoy receptors, or via interactome interference. Many such proteins are immunogenic suggesting that antibody mediated knockdown of multiple schizophrenia gene products could contribute to the disease, explaining the immune activation in the brain and lymphocytes in schizophrenia, and the preponderance of immune-related gene variants in the schizophrenia genome. Schizophrenia may thus be a “pathogenetic” autoimmune disorder, caused by pathogens, genes, and the immune system acting together, and perhaps preventable by pathogen elimination, or curable by the removal of culpable antibodies and antigens.
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spelling pubmed-33354632012-05-07 Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes Carter, C. J. J Pathog Research Article Many genes have been implicated in schizophrenia as have viral prenatal or adult infections and toxoplasmosis or Lyme disease. Several autoantigens also target key pathology-related proteins. These factors are interrelated. Susceptibility genes encode for proteins homologous to those of the pathogens while the autoantigens are homologous to pathogens' proteins, suggesting that the risk-promoting effects of genes and risk factors are conditional upon each other, and dependent upon protein matching between pathogen and susceptibility gene products. Pathogens' proteins may act as dummy ligands, decoy receptors, or via interactome interference. Many such proteins are immunogenic suggesting that antibody mediated knockdown of multiple schizophrenia gene products could contribute to the disease, explaining the immune activation in the brain and lymphocytes in schizophrenia, and the preponderance of immune-related gene variants in the schizophrenia genome. Schizophrenia may thus be a “pathogenetic” autoimmune disorder, caused by pathogens, genes, and the immune system acting together, and perhaps preventable by pathogen elimination, or curable by the removal of culpable antibodies and antigens. SAGE-Hindawi Access to Research 2011 2011-05-26 /pmc/articles/PMC3335463/ /pubmed/22567321 http://dx.doi.org/10.4061/2011/128318 Text en Copyright © 2011 C. J. Carter. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
spellingShingle Research Article
Carter, C. J.
Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title_full Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title_fullStr Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title_full_unstemmed Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title_short Schizophrenia: A Pathogenetic Autoimmune Disease Caused by Viruses and Pathogens and Dependent on Genes
title_sort schizophrenia: a pathogenetic autoimmune disease caused by viruses and pathogens and dependent on genes
topic Research Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3335463/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22567321
http://dx.doi.org/10.4061/2011/128318
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