Thursday, March 5, 2009

You may get annoyed with your psychotic relative, but....

Alright, so this post won't be a complete analysis of this interesting paper I've found, because I admittedly did not read though it, and just looked at the hard data. Which is the most important part, right?

I think this paper is a good follow-up to that last article I discussed in my previous two posts. That was supposed to be about just the content of the brain, but I expanded it to include mental processes. Here's a paper than refers to the processes themselves, although very basic ones.

Investigating the association between neurocognition and psychosis in bipolar disorder: further evidence for the overlap with schizophrenia

Yeah yeah yeah, schizophrenia and BPD, we're all alike. Let's go beyond that. I'm actually not going to talk about what they've concluded in this paper, because they're trying to say we have no reaction time and simple processing skills, which I'm going to ignore - at least for the time being.

What I will talk about is a trend I found from reading the hard data. Basically, normals are "smarter" than MDs. But BUT BUT! Non-affected family members of those with BPD are "smarter" than the normals!!! (I'm putting "smarter" in quotes because I have little faith that these simple tests prove anything concrete about cognitive function - perhaps the small stuff, yes, but what about higher level cognition, integration of information and all that?)

What does this mean? Well, you know that psychotic aunt you have (ahem, ahem, JESSICA :-)? Thank her for her part in your genes, because she may have given you an edge above everyone else. What I want to know is, if I'm a relative of a few MDs, does that give me an edge too? But because I'm already a MD, it all evens out?

The world may never know. (I promise I'll fully read that article. I'm printing it right now for the train ride.)

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