Ingredient in soap points toward new drugs for infection that affects 2 billion

WOW.

I can’t believe no one has yet responded to your post.

What is the proportion of cat-owners to dog owners among Democrats and Republicans ?

I’m guessing that there may be something to this.

Two young people graduate from college and move to an urban area for their first job.

One gets a cat for companionship, the other gets a dog.

Which one will be more likely to marry, settle down and move to the suburbs to raise a family?

The cat-owning urban person will more likely be a liberal Democrat, while the dog-owner will more likely move to the suburbs and become a Republican.

“Toxo preferentially knows how to home in on the part of the brain that is all about fear and anxiety, a brain region called the amygdala. The amygdala is where you do your fear conditioning; the amygdala is what’s hyperactive in people with post-traumatic stress disorder; the amygdala is all about pathways of predator aversion, and Toxo knows how to get in there.

“Toxo would take the dendrites, the branch and cables that neurons have to connect to each other, and shriveled them up in the amygdala. It was disconnecting circuits. You wind up with fewer cells there. This is a parasite that is unwiring this stuff in the critical part of the brain for fear and anxiety.

“it’s not just destroying this fear aversive response, it’s creating something new. It’s creating an attraction to the cat urine. Meanwhile, there is a well-characterized circuit that has to do with sexual attraction. And as it happens, part of this circuit courses through the amygdala, and then goes to different areas of the brain than the fear pathways.

“Toxo-infected rats, right around the time when they start liking the smell of cat urine, you expose them to cat pheromones, and you don’t see the stress hormone release. What you see is that the fear circuit doesn’t activate normally, and instead the sexual arousal activates some.

“In other words, Toxo knows how to hijack the sexual reward pathway. Somehow, this damn parasite knows how to make cat urine smell sexually arousing to rodents, and they go and check it out.

“In the Toxo genome, it’s got two versions of the gene called tyrosine hydroxylase. And if you were a neuro-chemistry type, you would be leaping up in shock and excitement at this point, because Tyrosine hydroxylase is the critical enzyme for making dopamine: the neurotransmitter in the brain that’s all about reward and anticipation of reward.

“And the Toxo genome has the mammalian gene for making the stuff. It’s got a little tail on the gene that targets, specifies, that when this is turned into the actual enzyme, it gets secreted out of the Toxo and into neurons. This parasite doesn’t need to learn how to make neurons act as if they are pleasurably anticipatory; it takes over the brain chemistry of it all on its own.

“Toxo’s got this one gene which allows it to just plug into the whole world of mammalian reward systems.

“If you get a Toxo infection, it has phases of inflammation, but eventually it goes into this latent asymptomatic stage, which is when these cysts form in the brain. Which is, in a rat, when it stops being anything boring like asymptomatic, and when the behavior starts occurring. Interestingly, that’s when the parasite starts making this tyrosine hydroxylase.

“So what about humans? A small literature is coming out now reporting neuropsychological testing on men who are Toxo-infected, showing that they get a little bit impulsive.

“And then the truly astonishing thing: two different groups independently have reported that people who are Toxo-infected have three to four times the likelihood of being killed in car accidents involving reckless speeding.

“Maybe you take a Toxo-infected human and they start having a proclivity towards doing dumb-ass things that we should be innately averse to. There’s a long-standing literature that absolutely shows there’s a statistical link between Toxo infection and schizophrenia. It’s not a big link, but it’s solidly there. Schizophrenics have higher than expected rates of having been infected with Toxo.

“Dopamine levels are too high in schizophrenia. That’s the leading suggestion of what schizophrenia is about neurochemically. You take Toxo-infected rodents and their brains have elevated levels of dopamine.”

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