14 DAY TRIAL // Scientists with the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin, Ireland, discovered in a recent study that people with a family history of schizophrenia who also suffer head trauma are 1.6 times more likely to develop the disorder than their peers who did not bang their heads.
The exact reason for which head trauma is linked to the development of this debilitating mental condition is not yet known. Researchers were baffled to discover the connection, but they say that they will continue their work until they figure out why this is happening.
Traumatic brain injuries (TBI) can occur in a variety of ways, such as for example after a fall, a car crash, or a powerful blow. Most of the time, patients have a concussion, but they can also suffer actual brain damage as a result of their ordeal.
In the past, scientists looked at potential links between TBI and schizophrenia, but the results of those investigations proved to be inconclusive. What the Irish experts did was systematize the previous data, and look for correlation in these combine databases.
Interestingly, the team was able to prove that a link is there, but was unable to determine the existence of a causal relationship between the two. In other words, they could not establish for a fact that TBI triggers the development of schizophrenia, LiveScience reports.
Discovering the nature of the connection is made even more difficult by the fact that experts did not have access to relevant data, such as for example whether the TBI patients were developing the mental disorder when they suffered their injuries or not.
Previous investigations did demonstrate that suffering a TBI can lead to an increased risk of people developing conditions such as anxiety disorders, substance use disorders and personality changes, but these are a far cry from the hallucinations associated with schizophrenia.
According to New York University professor of psychiatry and environmental medicine Dr. Dolores Malaspina, it could be that blows and injuries to the head simply “unmask a psychotic illness,” whose seeds may have already been there for a long time.
But establishing whether this is a fact or not is nearly impossible, since there is no way of knowing which of the people predisposed to developing schizophrenia will suffer a TBI. At the same time, scientists can't go out and start banging people's heads against walls for the sake of a research.
A possible way to go forward, the Irish team writes in the August 2 issue of the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin, is to monitor those with a family history of mental disorders. The data gather in this manner can then be used when and if these individuals suffer traumatic brain injuries.