Electronic Treatment of Schizophrenia

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mental health, mental illness, psychiatry, psychology, psychosis, psychotic, schizophrenia, science, therapy

Avatars created by schizophrenia patients and operated by therapists – a treatment that has shown encouraging results in a pilot study. Photograph: Professor Julian Leff/UCL/PA

Schizophrenia is a serious mental illness, which effects approximately 2.4 million Americas. Individuals with schizophrenia display a myriad of symptoms including bizarre or disorganized behavior, thought patters and emotional responses. The most well know symptom is hearing voices, though hearing voices is not a requirement to be diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is particularly difficult to treat. It was not until the advent of anti-psychotic medication that there was even an effect method of treatment. Prior to that individuals with schizophrenia were frequently put away in mental institutions indefinitely or they were subjected to lobotomies or electo-convulsive therapy.

The advent of anti-psychotic medications in the 1950’s allowed for more reasonable treatment of individuals with schizophrenia. Unfortunately the medications don’t always work or they may come with significant side-effects. Attempts to utilize more traditional talk therapies with schizophrenic individuals has not shown to be particularly effective. But now there may be a new option available.

A pilot study (small scale initial investigation) has yielded some very interesting results in treating individuals with schizophrenia using talk therapy. The patients created an avatar for the voice(s) they heard. They created a face and voice to mimic the one that they hear in their head.

Julian Leff, emeritus professor of mental health sciences at UCL, who developed the therapy and is leading the project, said: “Patients interact with the avatar as though it was a real person, because they have created it they know that it cannot harm them – as opposed to the voices, which often threaten to kill or harm them and their family. As a result, the therapy helps patients gain the confidence and courage to confront the avatar, and their persecutor.

“We record every therapy session on MP3, so that the patient essentially has a therapist in their pocket which they can listen to at any time when harassed by the voices. We’ve found that this helps them to recognise that the voices originate within their own mind and reinforces their control over the hallucinations.”

– The Guardian

The idea is that by turning the voice(s) into an avatar then the patient can deal with them like any other relationship. The therapist plays the role of both therapist and the avatar by responding in either their normal voice or in the voice of the avatar. With the guidance of the therapist patients are able to respond to the avatar and learn how to confront their own voices. Patients are empowered to challenge the disturbing statements made by their voices.

After only seven 30 minute session there was a decrease in the severity and frequency of the voices heard by the patients. Yes that was only 3 1/2 hours of therapy and they saw a difference. In fact 3 out of 16 patients stopped hearing voices all together. It is very impressive that so much improvement can be made so quickly. Now a larger study is going to be conducted at the King’s College London Institute of Psychiatry and may have results toward the end of 2015.

This could change the lives of millions of people for the better. It could help empower individual’s with schizophrenia so that they can take control over the voices that have plagued them for years. This discovery could bring about a revolution in the treatment of schizophrenia. I truly hope that the larger study yields as good results as the pilot so that this treatment can be brought to people in need as soon as possible.

New Study Links GMO Food To Leukemia OR Not

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biology, Bt, genetically modified organism, GMO, Leukemia, science, toxicology

Currently there are articles spreading across the internet stating that GMO food causes Leukemia. Unfortunately these claims are false. I understand the research is complicated  and that many don’t understand it; I am one of you. The difference between you and me is that my wife is a molecular biologist so I have asked her to look over the article. There are a number of disturbing aspect to this article which everybody should know. Here is a link to the study.

First let’s examine the source

First when you look at the study paper take note that it is printed in Issue 1 Volume 1 of Journal of Hematology & Thromboembolic Diseases. My wife noticed this when looking into the journal itself to find an ‘impact factor’ which is a measure of how frequently a specific journal is cited. Impact Factor is basically a measure of how much the scientific community respects a journal. That led her to realize that this article is published in the very first Issue of the Journal of Hematology & Thromboembolic Diseases. This in itself is a very questionable finding.

Next looking into the journal more it was found that OMICS Publishing Group owns the journal. Apparently they own more than 250 journals but many contain no content. In fact the NIH (National Institutes of Health) will not accept OMICS papers on PubMed which is a very well respected database of scientific research. That is not a good sign, if the entire publishing group is not allowed on PubMed then that means scientific peers do not believe OMICS meets the standards of peer review.

Then guess what was found? The journal article was withdrawn from the Journal of Food and Chemical Toxicology. So the original publisher of the study later determined it was sufficiently flawed to remove it from the journal. That is major; journals don’t withdraw articles lightly. Functionally it involves the journal admitting that they should not have publish the articles in the first place due to the flaws in the article.

So right now before even examining the methodology of the study we know that the article was originally published in Food and Chemical Toxicology later to be withdrawn. Then it was published in the Journal of Hematology & Thromboembolic Diseases Issue 1 Volume 1 which is owned by a OMICS who are no longer allowed to submit papers to PubMed a well respected source of scientific literature.

Now let’s examine the study itself.

The study did not feed ANY GMO food to mice. NONE of the mice ate ANY GMO at all. Instead they fed the organism Bacillus thuringiensis to the mice. This is important since GMO involves introducing a single protein from Bacillus thuringiensis whereas the study fed mice the whole organism. That means that there was much more than the Bt protein being fed to the mice. So from that one aspect alone we know that the effects found were not due to GMO food, nor was it due to the Bt protein. Rather the effects were due to the entire Bacillus thuringiensis organism.  Thus any effects found can’t be generalized to GMO food.

Next the study did not utilize proper controls. Some mice were give Bacillus thuringiensis in their water while others were given plain water. Instead the control should have been a Bacillus thuringiensis bacteria that does not express the Bt protein. The reason is that that ensures minimal differences between the groups and thus allows attribution of the results due to those differences. Simply put we don’t know the effect of the bacteria compared to the effect of the Bt protein. We only see the whole effect of the bacteria with Bt protein. A proper comparison would be between bacteria with and without the Bt protein so that we can say the protein had an effect as opposed to other things in the bacteria driving the effect.

Then consider that amount of Bt given to the mice. In the study the mice were given either 27mg/Kg, 136mg/Kg or 270mg/Kg. According to David Tribe “The amounts fed the mice do not reflect human dietary levels– they were some ~ 10⁶ to 10⁸ time higher than exposure from GM or organic crops ( as per Hammond, 2012)”. So the level of exposure was somewhere between 1 million and 100 million times the amount humans are exposed to through consumption. Just about anything is dangerous when consumed excessively. You can even die from drinking too much water or soy sauce. So it is no surprise that being exposed at that excessive level may show results.

Finally the sample size was small. The study used only 3 mice per sex per group. Such a small sample size makes it extremely difficult to demonstrate results with any confidence. When sample sizes are small it is very hard for statistics to identify any significant effects. Furthermore any random sampling error will have a greater effect when the sample size is small. That is sometimes even if a sample is properly selected there is a possibility that some in the sample are going to react differently than the norm. This is always a possibility in science. But when the sample is small if one mouse reacts differently than the norm it may skew the results leading researchers to believe that the anomalous reaction is the norm. This make generalizing ANY results from the study questionable until it can be repeated with a larger sample size.

The study is bunk.

Simply put the study is bunk, there are no two ways about it. The researchers did not give ANY animal ANY GMO food in the study. Thus they can’t generalize to GMO food. Also the researchers did not control their study properly and used to small a sample size. So they cannot generalize their results accurately to the world around us. On top of that the amount of Bt was more than a million times the exposure humans get from consuming GMO food. Since humans will not consume Bt at that level they can’t generalize the results to a more realistic level of consumption. Finally the study was withdrawn from the original journal only to show up in the first issues of a unknown journal.

Thus the study methodology is deeply flawed while at the same time the article and journal have been rejected by the scientific community. There is nothing of value that can be garnered from this study.

Politicized Science

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Congress, Lamar Smith, National Science Foundation, NSF, politicized science, politics, Representative Smith, research, science, science funding

Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX)

Yesterday I wrote a piece about a bill proposed by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), in that I focused on the three proposed criteria for receipt of funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other federally funded research. I think it is important to first examine proposed legislation as it is written. Opposition to legislation should be based on the legislation itself. But it is also important to examine the motivations behind the bill which is what I will do today.

It seems clear to me that Representative Smith is attempting to politicize science with little to no understanding of science. The biggest indication is a letter Smith sent to Dr Marrett the director of the NSF. In the letter Smith requests the peer reviews for funding five specific projects. On the surface that seems quite reasonable, he is simply asking for more information about how funding decisions are made. The problem is that Representative Smith would not understand the peer review in the least bit. He is completely scientific illiterate; he is not even aware that reproducibility is a key feature of the scientific method. So it is unlikely he selected those studies in order to receive an education in the scientific method. If he wanted even a basic understanding of science he should be going back to school. Instead he seems that he wants to criticize the funding choices made by the NSF.

The second indication is in the bill he proposed; it requires that the director of the NSF to certify that each project meets the funding criteria in the bill. Off hand many may say that isn’t a big deal, so what? But politically it is big. The director will have certified that the funding is in accordance to the law (currently proposed bill) then if Congress disagrees with any funding choice they can attack the director as not upholding her legal obligations as defined by Congress. This would give them an easy route to challenge any scientific funding decision they wish. Now it does not have any legal teeth in that there is no legal penalty written into the bill. But there would be a political penalty; Congress could pressure the director of the NSF to resign should Congress disagree with funding.

The third indication of the political nature of this bill is that it requires the director of the NSF to report back to Congress at minimum twice over the following year. Again on the surface that doesn’t sound bad. The problem is that Representative Smith is creating opportunities to require the director to report to Congress which creates opportunities for him to attack the NSF funding choices he disagrees with.

Thus Representative Smith has requested information about funding choices yet he lacks the basic knowledge necessary to judge those choices. He want the director of the NSF to personally certify every funding choice is in accordance with the criteria he lays out which is done to attach the directors name to the funding and the legal requirements. Then he has set up additional required meeting with the director which would provide opportunities to challenge NSF funding choices. This makes it clear that Representative Lamar Smith did not create this bill in order to improve the state of science in the country, instead he created it so that he can directly pressure the NSF about which projects it chooses to fund.

Science policy by those without an understanding of science

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Congress, National Science Foundation, NSF, politics, research, science, science funding, scientific method

US Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) has proposed a new bill to set funding criteria for the National Science Foundation (NSF). According to the bill any award of funding by the NSF must meet the following three criteria.

1) “… in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

2) “… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

3) “… not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

– ScienceInsider

Even the suggestion of these criteria demonstrates a completely lack of understanding about science methodology. Let’s start with the first criteria and work our way through all of them.

1) “… in the interests of the United States to advance the national health, prosperity, or welfare, and to secure the national defense by promoting the progress of science;

This criteria is nothing but hollow rhetoric. What constitutes advancing health, prosperity, welfare or defense? Those areas are so broad that they encompass everything. There is little out there which could not be argued to advance those interests in some manner or another. The problem is that frequently legislators and the public don’t understand what the research is doing enough to judge whether it would meet this first criteria.

2) “… the finest quality, is groundbreaking, and answers questions or solves problems that are of utmost importance to society at large; and

It would be nice to fund nothing but groundbreaking novel research but the fact is that very little of science is groundbreaking. It takes hundreds of thousand of man hours to research questions which many people would consider trivial in order to build a foundation for groundbreaking research. The truly novel discoveries depend on having a base level of knowledge about the area of interest.

Few would consider research in to number theory to be groundbreaking or of great importance. Yet John Tate’s work on number theory was used as the basis for creating internet encryption which made internet business possible.

In 1952 few would have labeled the x-ray diffraction image taken by Rosalind Franklin to be groundbreaking. But that image became the basis of our modern understanding of DNA which transformed our understanding of biology and medicine.

These are but two examples of seemingly unimportant research at the time which later completely changed our lives. There is no way to tell at the outset what research will lead to. In fact it may take decades in order to understand the importance of research. It is rather common for individuals to receive Nobel prizes decades later because their research became the foundation for new innovations. It is completely unreasonable to expect ALL research to APPEAR to be groundbreaking before even starting the research.

3) “… not duplicative of other research projects being funded by the Foundation or other Federal science agencies.”

Finally the third criteria shows that Representative Smith has a complete lack of understanding about science methodology. This criteria requires that research not duplicate any other research. Yet replication of research is absolutely necessary for scientific advancement. Each and every experiment must be designed such that any other researcher can replicate the experiment with the same results as the original. This is a requirement on ANY experimental design. Why? Because every human endeavor is error prone. There is always a possibility of error; that might be human error in execution of the study; it might be random sampling error; it might be an uncontrollable factor that can’t be accounted for. The source of error doesn’t matter, that fact is that humans are error prone. To compensate for that researchers replicate studies that have already been done in order to verify the results. A single study does not make something true in science. That study must be replicated in order to demonstrate that the original study was accurate.

If replication is not funded then how do we know that the original work is correct? The original could have found an effect which does not exist (type 1 error) or it could fail to find an effect that does exist (type 2 error). There would be no way of knowing without replication. So if no effect was found then it would be erroneously assumed that no effect exists and then no further research in that area would be funded. Whereas if an effect was found that does not exist then research could continue in that area but it would only waste money since it is based on erroneous information. Instead replication serves as the means by which science can correct itself. Replication helps to root out errors made in science so they can be corrected and so that researchers don’t continue to propagate those errors.

In conclusion Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) has no clue about science. He has put forth nice sounding rhetoric about making science funding about advancing the health, prosperity, welfare and defense of the country. But he has no clue about the importance of replication. He also fails to understand that not all science can be groundbreaking. Groundbreaking discoveries are built on years of mundane research. Those that create policy about science should have a solid understanding and background in science. Otherwise they are creating laws about something they do not know and thus they should not be involved in.

The Scientific Method 101

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causation, correlation, education, experimental design, science, scientific experiment, scientific method, statistics

The scientific method is a mystery to many people. They may hear about scientific discoveries in the news but they don’t understand how an experiment is conducted. So I wrote this for those who are curious about the scientific method.

A scientific experiment requires four basic components; a researcher controlled independent variable, a dependent variable, a random sample and random assignment. First I will define each then I will put them together.

Say you want to find out if fertilizer X is better than fertilizer Y for growing tomatoes. What would you do? Well first you would get a bunch of tomatoes of the same variety and both types of fertilizers. You would plant a third of the tomatoes with fertilizer X and a third with fertilizer Y and a third with no fertilizer. Every plant would have equal chance of getting fertilizer X, Y or no fertilizer.   You would plant them all the same day. They all would be planted in a place where all plants get equal sunshine. Every plant would receive equal water and fertilizer.

The independent variable (IV) is what you think will have an effect. In this case it is the fertilizer. Take note that one group has no fertilizer. That is the control group, it tells us what would happen without intervention. That gives us a baseline to compare the effects of the fertilizers. Without a control group you don’t know what effect any fertilizer has on tomatoes. Another critical feature of the IV is that the researcher controls it. Since the researcher can control the IV you can make an attribution of causation. That is you can say IF I do X then A occurs, if I do Y then B occurs, if I do nothing then C occurs. If you are slightly confused don’t worry, we will come back to this after explaining the rest of the experiment.

The dependent variable is what you expect the independent variable to cause. In our experiment we could use a number of dependent variables. Maybe you think a better fertilizer leads to larger plants. Maybe you think it leads to more tomatoes. Maybe you think it leads to more nutritious tomatoes. An experiment requires a minimum of one dependent variable but can more than one. Since this is set up as a basic experiment that anybody could do in their backyard it makes sense to select plant size and amount of tomatoes as the dependent variable. Very few have access or the knowledge to test the nutrition of tomatoes. So now that we have selected the dependent variable we have to decide how to measure those variables. For plant size we could measure height or we could measure mass. In order to measure mass we could have to pull the plant out of the ground to weigh it and few people would want to kill their plants for that. Whereas measuring height is simple and easy which makes it a great measure for this experiment. When it comes to measuring the amount of tomatoes we could opt to count the number of tomatoes produced or measure the mass of tomatoes produced. Because it is easy enough to weigh the tomatoes I would chose to measure the mass of tomatoes produced. That allows me to tell if one plant is producing larger tomatoes even if it is producing the same number as another plant. Now one key to the dependent variable is that you must specifically define how it is measured and then apply it consistently. The definition should be clear enough that another person could duplicate your experiment on their own. For example when measuring the mass of tomatoes produced do you ensure that the stem is completely removed or can you leave some of the stem attached? I would remove the stem entirely so I am only measuring the tomatoes but I have to ensure that I include such specifics in my definition of my dependent variable.

Next is random sampling, that requires that every member of a population has the same chance of being part of the study. That means when you go to buy all the tomato plants every one of them should have an equal chance of being picked. We don’t want to go and just pick the healthiest looking ones or the largest. That would skew the results. There are number of ways to accomplish this. You could decide before going to the store that you would buy every 5th tomato plant you see. This type of sampling is done in survey research when dealing with a crowd like a event, rally or demonstration. Or you could decide that you will roll a 6 sided dice for each plant and take any that you roll a 6 for. The key is that all have equal chance. That allows you to generalize your results to the population as a whole because you pulled out a random group from the population so theoretically it should represent the whole group. Whereas if you picked only the healthiest plants then you could only generalize your results to the healthiest population of plants. Whatever group you sample for the study is what group you can generalize your results to.

The final requirement is random assignment. Every member of the sample should be randomly assigned to the different conditions of the IV. In our experiment all tomato plants should have an equal chance of getting fertilizer X as getting fertilizer Y as getting no fertilizer. This is done because there will always be individual differences in a population. There will be genetic and environmental factors in the past that influence the individuals whether those individuals are plants or humans or whatever they are. By randomly assigning individuals to groups then those differences are distributed between the groups. In theory the differences should be equally distributed. In our experiment say that some of the plants we bought were less healthy than others. Well if we randomly assign each plant to the three groups then it is likely that each group would end up with about the same number of unhealthy plants. That equalizes the effects of those unhealthy plants on the final results since they are distributed between all the groups.

Now it is time to put this all together. We have an independent variable (IV) which is the type of fertilizer (X or Y or None). We have two dependent variables (DV); the height of the plants and the mass of the tomatoes. We believe that the type of fertilizer (IV) will have an effect on the tomato plants which is measured as our DVs. In addition we randomly sampled the tomato plants from the store by ensuring each plant had an equal chance of being included in the study. Finally we randomly assigned all of the plants to one of the conditions of the IV. Otherwise every plant should be as equal as possible in treatment. They are planted in a place where all can get equal sunshine. They all receive the same amount of water. The groups that get fertilizer get equal amounts of fertilizer each.

This set up will allow us to determine what effects the fertilizers (or no fertilizer) causes to occur with the tomato plants. So how do we know that? Well we held all conditions we could control equal (water, sun, etc). The conditions we could not hold equal like the individual variations in genetics or past environment we distributed randomly among the conditions of the IV so as to equalize the impact on each group. The only change between groups was the IV which we controlled. So we can say with confidence that changing the IV is what caused the difference in the plants because it was the only feature being changed. Furthermore since we randomly sampled plants from the population we can generalize the results we see to that population. By randomly picking individuals from the population we are able to assume that the sample we tested would be equivalent to any other random sample pulled from the same population because the individual differences should be equally represented in our sample as they are in the population as a whole.

Well there you have it, we have set up an experimental design. This is the same basic design of just about any experiment. It could be applied to tomatoes or psychology or biology or just about anything. At a later point I will go over correlational designs which are used heavily in medicine, economics and sociology.

DISCLAIMER: The only piece that I did not and will not go over in this post is the statistical testing to determine if there really is an effect of fertilizer. Just because one group has slight taller plants or slightly more tomatoes does not mean that we can definitively say the IV caused that effect. That is because there are individual differences in plants and that must be accounted for when determining if there was an effect. We have to statistically test before making that declaration. Unfortunately explaining even a simple T test or F test is quite a lengthy process and beyond the scope here. Though if the differences are large then it is very very likely that the IV caused the differences because it is very likely the statistics would turn out that way. But I am warning against saying the IV caused a difference if the differences are minimal.