View Single Post
  #7  
Old June 19th 15, 03:29 PM posted to rec.pets.cats.health+behav
whisky-dave
external usenet poster
 
Posts: 14
Default New study links schizophrenia to cat ownership

On Thursday, 18 June 2015 18:45:15 UTC+1, Rhino wrote:
On 2015-06-18 6:13 AM, whisky-dave wrote:

If you've not heard.


http://www.alphr.com/science/1000973...-cat-ownership

The other voice in my head doesn't agree.


Approximately 50 percent of the people who later had schizophrenia had
cats around when they were children. That might seem significant at
first but I'm guessing that a much higher percentage of eventual
schizophrenics had exposure to hot dogs or peanut butter or
electromagnetic radiation as kids. Wouldn't those things be more likely
the culprit than cats?


No more so than smoking certain types of pot, or taking acid I suspect.
They have found T.gondi in ottors in the UK, which they believe comes from empting cat litter into the water system.


Scientists express this sort of reasoning succinctly with the
observation that "correlation is not the same as causation".

As far as I known T.gondi has not been shown to cause schizophrenia. I
believe the cause(s) of schizophrenia remain entirely unknown.

They do but they think that certain things either trigger them or make you more likely to 'suffer' schizophrenia .

from Someday
we will, I hope, figure out the cause of schizophrenia and that will
help us figure out how to prevent it, assuming it can be prevented.


Yes and that takes a lot of time and study.

In
the meantime, accept that we don't know and avoid persecuting cats just
on the suspicion that they may be involved.


I'm not persecuting cats niether is anyone else. Most people know of mad cat ladies. Maybe constant exposure to T.gondi (rather than the cats) does cause cetain traits like this, we won't know whitout either animal testing and/or large scale studies.