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Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

economist.com

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Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#81

Post by r2_pilot »

cloudquelle wrote: post #29

When I was around 12 or 13, I had the Epstein-Barr virus. For a couple of *months* I couldn’t: - Walk straight. Always looked like I was completely drunk - Speak normally. Each word I spoke was only half-finished and I had to constantly re-pronounce any words again and again - Write on paper. I just couldn’t write a single sentence, it just didn’t work. I had practically lost the “precision ” of any movements Not to…

Unfortunately it has not gotten the attention it deserves from the medical community. Their consensus is that you only get it once(generally). I've had 3 documented cases, the last in 2019, and that one put me out of commission for basically an entire month. I'm hopeful that future medicine eliminates this disease entirely.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#82

Post by wizzwizz4 »

genewitch wrote: post #56
markisus wrote: post #4

I wonder if these findings may partially explain the often derided theory that childhood vaccines can cause autism. The article directly mentions that an autism misdiagnosis can result from psychiatric symptoms resulting from an autoimmune response after certain infections.

No, you don't understand, "vaccines" are just biological agents now. They're no longer merely "weakened" forms of what we're trying to protect against. Don't you see? Vaccines can't cause this sort of injury, because they're not the disease! Definition of the word "vaccine": Nov, 2020: "Definition of vaccine: a preparation of killed microorganisms, living attenuated organisms, or living fully virulent organisms that…

> don't worry, i'm sure it doesn't mean anything.

It means we invented mRNA vaccines, which were never organisms of any kind. But they're clearly vaccines. Whatever dictionary you picked updated its definition accordingly. Strictly speaking, according to your "Nov, 2020" definition, smallpox is a cowpox vaccine. I think that's silly. I'd prefer a definition like:

> vaccine (n): a substance that supplies antigenic information to the immune system to protect against a disease, while causing less harm than the disease that the vaccine immunises against.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#83

Post by genewitch »

reilly3000 wrote: post #58
genewitch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the mechanism of the flu thing (and i have heard it, after you get infected you're more social until the virus confines you to bed), but the craving sugar thing is 100% gut biome, the grass-fed gut flora release opioids when they eat grass, which get sent, via the blood, to our brains, which make us feel good. not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal!

This is fascinating. I wanted to know more about that but my cursory searches didn’t turn up anything except for connections between opioid use and gut microbes. It certainly feels like withdrawal!

oh, i get downvoted every time i bring this up on any social media platform that supports downvoting. see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37129256 for example.

I'm not sure where all of my research PDFs wound up over the last 20 years, but start with that DOI ( 10.1016/0014-5793(92)80414-C ) from 1992(!).

There's a trend to looking into the gut for causes of certain diseases. Prior to the pandemic, there were publications that Alzheimer's, for example, was linked to gut biome.

I get the downvotes, what i say goes against conventional wisdom, that all you gotta do to lose weight is "not eat so much" - but the human body is not just your brain and heart and some tooling to allow intake of fuel as food.

There's a growing (and, depending on your views of "life", alarming) sense that our guts are in more control than we think. This can cause a lot of "free-willers" to get upset and be reactionary.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#84

Post by notamy »

badcppdev wrote: post #8

This is sad: "years spent campaigning to get doctors to take the illnesses seriously." It's like that saying, "Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others". Our medical system where we rely on individual doctors for primary care is really flawed but it's better than any alternatives that we have (or that we can afford anyway)

> or that we can afford anyway

That’s the big one in my experience. Functional medicine doctors are some miracle workers, but only if you can afford hundreds of dollars per visit / thousands of dollars in lab tests that insurance will never pay for.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#85

Post by xpe »

pixl97 wrote: post #78
mistersquid wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not eating and getting low blood sugar can much more simply answer the question of "Do I have free will, or am I a subject of my internal chemical reactions". You cannot control what you feel, but you can control your actions.

Can you? I'm a type 1 diabetic, I have a continuous monitor that tells me what my glucose level is. This monitors actual interstitial fluid level and not blood sugar, this means there can be a pretty large delay between what's measured just under the skin versus what my blood stream is experiencing. If a rapid drop occurs there can be a lead time that I'm unaware of it, but others are because I'll behave in a 'cranky…

Well said.

> You are in far less control of your actions then you believe.

No. But I say this in a way that might surprise you?

I view 'free will', as most people understand it, as an illusion.

I recognize that I, at best, have a tiny fraction of control. If I consider "me" to be a locus of control w.r.t. volitional action, then I will grant that "me" has causal impact. But what causally impacted "me" at time t? A combination of "me" at time t-1 and my environment. (I'm a materialist who is agnostic w.r.t. determinism.)

So, what does this really mean? "I" (right now) can only have volitional control only if one ignores the precursors. It is a mindbending realization to many, but it is the best theory I've found that fits reality.

There are lots of us around. We might disagree on how we define 'free will'; we may or may not 'deny free will'. But there is a huge commonality among most rational materialists who accept modern science: we do not conceptualize free will in ways that match 'mainstream' notions of it.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#86

Post by genewitch »

Aurornis wrote: post #53
genewitch wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know the mechanism of the flu thing (and i have heard it, after you get infected you're more social until the virus confines you to bed), but the craving sugar thing is 100% gut biome, the grass-fed gut flora release opioids when they eat grass, which get sent, via the blood, to our brains, which make us feel good. not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal!

> not eating grasses means we go through opiate withdrawal! That's an unreasonable exaggeration. Nobody is getting significant opioid modulation and withdrawals from their microbiome.

And ketchup doesn't have enough nicotine in it, even when applied to potatoes, to notice!

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#87

Post by 4gotunameagain »

_aavaa_ wrote: post #54
dylan604 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the idea that a virus can change the behavior of the host to make it more likely to spread is one of those things that's beyond creepy. lots of scifi based on this, and the ones that are more subtle are much more effective than getting bit by a zombie trope.

Have I got bad news for you. This is past speculation in certain species: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/animals/article/cordyceps...

Also in humans, with the rabies virus which makes people be repulsed by water, which would limit the spread of the virus since its vector is saliva.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#88

Post by gruez »

sp332 wrote: post #47
whimsicalism wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> remember reading awhile back about a study that showed people with the flu are generally more social while the virus is spreading. Am I an idiot or is this clearly non-causal?

To clarify, the the claim is that individuals are more sociable when they are infected with the flu virus. These results show that there is an immediate active behavioral response to infection before the expected onset of symptoms or sickness behavior. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20816312/

I did a quick skim and the main problems with the study are:

1. no placebo, so it's unclear whether it was actually due to the flu virus or some unrelated factor. The study admits this might be an issue, but casually dismisses it with "We looked for this, and found no such effects."

2. the "flu virus" in question is actually a vaccine. Needless to say there's a big difference between getting a flu shot and an actual flu.

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#89

Post by bowsamic »

badcppdev wrote: post #8

This is sad: "years spent campaigning to get doctors to take the illnesses seriously." It's like that saying, "Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others". Our medical system where we rely on individual doctors for primary care is really flawed but it's better than any alternatives that we have (or that we can afford anyway)

I don’t understand why doctors are so dismissive and mean people

Re: Common infections can spark psychiatric illnesses in children

#90

Post by fragmede »

bowsamic wrote: post #89
badcppdev wrote: post #8

This is sad: "years spent campaigning to get doctors to take the illnesses seriously." It's like that saying, "Capitalism: The worst economic system, except for all the others". Our medical system where we rely on individual doctors for primary care is really flawed but it's better than any alternatives that we have (or that we can afford anyway)

I don’t understand why doctors are so dismissive and mean people

Emotional fatigue.
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