Genes have almost nothing to do with it
The chief psychiatrist of Moscow spoke about the causes of schizophrenia
In 80% of cases, schizophrenia is not caused genetically, the chief freelance psychiatrist of the Moscow Department of Health told RIA Novosti in an interview George Kostyuk.
"It is very difficult to accept the situation that your loved one, your child has a mental disorder, and a severe one, for example, in the form of schizophrenia. There are psychological traps here. Many believe that these disorders are hereditary. If a child has schizophrenia, then it seems to the parent that he is a carrier. But in fact, in 80% of cases schizophrenia is a primary chronic disease," Kostyuk said.
The psychiatrist noted that in the absence of help, the disease can lead to significant personality changes, disability.
"If it was possible to achieve improvement quickly, it seems to the patient's relatives that the person has become normal and he does not need to take medicine. Therefore, when a person refuses medications, he feels even better at first, because those painful disorders that he had, they have not yet resumed, and the side effects are gone. And then comes the deterioration. And this situation is unsolvable: no matter what highly intelligent parents are, they will definitely go through the stage of rejection of therapy, deterioration, and the whole question is, from what time they will come to terms with the situation, and still begin to strictly follow the recommendations," Kostyuk said.
At the same time, the agency's interlocutor clarified that many mental illnesses can be genetically determined, traced at the population level, at the molecular level, but this cannot be a breakdown of a specific gene. For example, in schizophrenia, which is a whole group of diseases, about 130 associated mutations in DNA have been identified, changes in which are somehow associated with the presence of such a disorder.
"What is population genetics? We take families, see what happens to the child. We look at the percentages. And they show that there is a genetic conditioning. But it is probabilistic. Two patients can have a healthy one. Two healthy people can have a sick child. There is no direct analogy, no direct connection. But the probability is higher that sick parents will have a sick child," the doctor added.
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