This is, like, the fifth time I’ve seen this headline. Everytime the mention that one study that says people get the disorder from eating too much cat shit. Sure. That totally sounds like a thing that happens often enough for a study to find that as a significant cause. This article, however, said that study met “mixed reception.” So it went on for a few minutes without saying anything and concluded “We just don’t know enough about the link between schizophrenia and cats.” This, my comrades, is real science.
Let’s say they have a bunch of “credible” reports of people with disorders eating cat shit, how do you then get to the conclusion that the cat is to blame and not the disorder?
It sounds like sloppy science and as they hint at in their conclusion “Correlation does not imply causation”.
I mean it sounds like ok science. “We maybe found a correlation but it’s pretty weak so we can’t be sure” is a valid result that can/should be published. It’s not going to win any awards but it’s something that other researchers might want to know. Might as well get it on the record just in case.
The problem is “science journalism” that likes to dig up mundane things like this and turn it into clickbait.
It’s not just science journalism. If a certain stakeholder wants a fake result to become public knowledge they pay for a study too small for a likely significant outcome, then they pay for fake journals to either publish: “possible connection between X and Y” or “no proven connection between X and Y” (whatever result suits them) and then wait for actual science journals and regular news if it’s clickbait enough to publish the same story.
Toxoplasma gondii is a fuck, 410,757,864,530 TENDER LYMPH NODES
I’m guessing they were working off the hypothesis that toxoplasmosis can trigger emergent schizophrenia symptoms, but that link seems sketchy at best. I’m not even sure how in the hell you’d set up a study around proving/disproving that.
unethically
Literally if u ever look at old timey discoveries it’ll be like: Some dude in 1930, “We force fed 500 children cat feces for science!”
No wonder all those kids were scowling and smoking cigarettes in the old pictures
Well if you do some kind of fucked up intervention you could prove a direct causal link, but I doubt it would be sufficient to rule out emergent symptoms. The subjects would likely react differently to laboratory conditions (perhaps weakening the immune system?). So you would only be testing a narrow hypothesis of how the parasite effects the subject. You would also neglect to find a baseline of how much contamination you could expect in the dwelling. So you could have a diet soda situation if you had 100x more exposure than is reasonable there is a risk but its not relevant
I believe a larger longitudinal non-intervening observation is both ethical and useful for establishing context.