Cats and Schizophrenia

Pet cats could cause schizophrenia in immuno-compramised adults, pregnant women and young children.

Cat lovers could conceive the above statement irrational. But anyway, the culprit is not the cat but the parasite Toxoplasma gondii. The cysts of these parasites love to linger in the litters of the cat. The cats which love to poo on the sand pits which children maintain for their play are the most dangerous ones. Toxoplasmosis targets cerebral neurons to produce a schizophrenia like picture with predominant positive symptoms.

On talking about the cat lovers and schizophrenia, the great artist at the turn of twentieth century, Louis Wain comes to my mind. He had to support his mother and five sisters with the strokes of his brush, hence his art brush was always on an elegant rush. How he came to love cats was an interesting story. His wife fell ill of cancer, throughout her incurable pain, only her pet cat peter good-humored her.Wain also would dress peter up and put goggles on peter to make his wife laugh. After her death, he would have felt grateful towards the cat for taking some burden of her struggle with cancer. His 'human like Cat'-arts were very popular in late the 1880s and 1890s.

In the early 1900s he started developing schizophrenic illness and he was dumped by his sisters in a pauper asylum. With the help of popular writer H.G.Wells, he was committed into the Bethlehem royal hospital. Here he somewhat improved and resumed painting, as days progressed his paintings became more abstract. The popular speculation is that the deterioration of his illness had reflected in his increasingly abstract art. ( view the above pictures of Wain downwards... could you make out deterioration or increasing fineness?)

Whether Wain contracted the Gondii from one of his numerous cat friends... nobody knows! but latest researches say the odds ratio of schizophrenia associated with IgG antibody was approximately 5.0.

How can the risk of transmission of toxoplasma from a cat to its owner be reduced?

Interview with schizophrenia researcher Dr. E. Fuller Torrey on the issue of cats and schizophrenia

Antibodies to Toxoplasma gondii in Patients With Schizophrenia:

A Meta-Analysis

Now the question session: Could pet cats could be used as treatment for schizophrenia? what is AAT?