Photo by Legolam, Banner Lengthened & ‘BRAINS’
by Heidi Stevenson
Gaia Health
The claim that schizophrenia shrinks brains is a lie told to scam people into taking the drugs. That’s why no one had tested whether the belief is true.
One of psychiatry’s favorite claims is that schizophrenia is a “brain disease”. By that, they mean it’s caused by a physically defective brain. They try to prove it by claiming that the disease causes the brain to shrink. Of course, they make this claim without a shred of proof—and the fact that it’s an invention is now proven by a study published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, a publication of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Here’s how authors of “Long-term Antipsychotic Treatment and Brain Volumes” described the reason for their study:
Progressive brain volume changes in schizophrenia are thought to be due principally to the disease. However, recent animal studies indicate that antipsychotics, the mainstay of treatment for schizophrenia patients, may also contribute to brain tissue volume decrement. Because antipsychotics are prescribed for long periods for schizophrenia patients and have increasingly widespread use in other psychiatric disorders, it is imperative to determine their long-term effects on the human brain.
So, Beng-Choon Ho and his fellow researchers at the University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine investigated by studying 211 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. All had received MRIs soon after diagnosis, and they each had an average of 3 scans in 7.2 years. They examined brain volume changes over time, focusing on how long the illness had lasted, whether antipsychotics were used, the severity of the illness, and other substance abuse to see how they affected brain shrinkage.
Here are the results in a nutshell:
- The longer a patient was on antipsychotics, the more the brain shrank.
- The more antipsychotics a patient was given, the more the brain shrank.
- The severity of illness had little or no effect on brain shrinkage.
- Substance abuse had little or no effect on brain shrinkage.
Read the Full Article Here: http://www.gaia-health.com/articles401/000413-drugs-shrink-schizo-brains-not-disease.shtml