Schizophrenia: Putting the Pieces Together

Introduction

There have been many theories, but most of the theories are false. There has been a lot of data, but putting the data together and making sense out of it has eluded the greatest scientists of our time. In my opinion the closest people to the answers have been the orthomolecular scientists. However, some scientists who were not orthomolecular have also made important contributions.

Pitts & McClure (1967)

In 1967 Pitts and McClure put forward the brilliant theory that high blood lactic acid concentrations might be the decisive factor in the causation of anxiety in susceptible individuals. They gave lactate infusions to patients and the patients developed panic attacks whereas controls didn't. This appears to be consistent with earlier Detroit work reporting high lactate in a schizophrenia assay.

Detroit Work

The Detroit workers at Wayne State University reported that the excess lactate came from too many amino acids flooding the cells, particularly tryptophan. This was caused by a toxic factor in the blood plasma that acted on the cell membrane.

Conclusions

In 1973 a brilliant book called "Orthomolecular Psychiatry" was published, edited by Hawkins & Pauling. In this book is a chapter by Wendel & Beebe. They found that "glycolytic activity" was abnormal in schizophrenia. There was a strong correlation between lactate and anxiety. Significantly less ATP was measured in the blood of anxiety-prone patients after glucose loading. They concluded that anxiety prone patients exhibit a marked shift from aerobic to anaerobic metabolism. There is a disturbance in ATP synthesis in schizophrenia. The markedly elevated lactate concentrations are consistent with both the Detroit work and the work by Pitts & McClure.

My own theory is that a low tryptophan diet should be tried. Such a diet would be very low in protein and modest in carbohydrates because carbohydrates pump tryptophan into the brain. Wendel & Beebe favored a diet similar to the Harris diet for hypoglycemia. Such a diet was also favored by Adelle Davis and Carlton Fredericks.