The idea of “nature versus nurture” is a common topic of conversation in the field of psychology. I think about it often in the context of how it’s not necessarily one aspect or the other that has the largest impact on expressed phenotypes or behaviors. I thought that the pairing of these articles worked really well together in looking at schizophrenia. While the Ayhan et al paper researched the impact of the timing of DISC1 mutations, the Burrows et al paper focused more on the effect of altering the environment in which the animals were reared.
It makes a lot of sense that the wild-type animals in the Burrows paper exhibited increased dendritic complexity, but it was a little disappointing to see that the knockout mice did not show any significant structural changes. I thought that both of these papers showed a decently wide range of types of techniques to validate their data, but it may have been interesting if there were more variability between subject groups.
In the Anyan paper, there were a few examples in the data which showed sexual dimorphism in relations to brain chemistry. I would be very interested to see what research comes after this knowing that some types of mental illnesses are more common in females versus males (and vice versa). In regards to schizophrenic patients, it seems like the use of therapy and behavioral modifications aren’t used as often as pharmaceuticals are. It’s interesting to think that there may be a preventative behavioral/environmental treatment for schizophrenia, but I am skeptical of how some of the data from the Burrows article could translate into the human experience. Could more studies prove that children with a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia need to be raised in a certain way to better prevent this mental illness?
No comments:
Post a Comment