There are 12 beautiful children and 6 schizophrenia in this family. This unique human disease actually has a high incidence.

The father is an air force official, and the mother is kind and optimistic. They have 12 children altogether. It sounds like a happy family. But who would have thought that half of the 12 children suffered from schizophrenia, and all of them were boys, which unfortunately accompanied the family for half a century. But through this strange family, researchers see the dawn of treating schizophrenia, a unique disease that only belongs to Homo sapiens.

The Galvin family lives in Colorado. His father, Don Galvin, is an official at the U.S. Air Force Academy (Air Force Academy). He and his wife Mimi have 12 children. The eldest child, Donald, was born in 1945, and the youngest, Mary, was born in 1965.

At first glance, their children are typical of the American baby boom in the last century. But in other ways, their children are atypical.

The eldest son, Donald, had an excellent first two decades of his life. He was a high school football star and wrestler, and once dated the daughter of a general of the United States Air Force Academy. But by the time he went to college, everything began to fall apart.

When he was in his 20s, he would do something out of line at school, such as breaking the plate suddenly, jumping into a bonfire or repeatedly abusing the cat. He also knows he has a problem, so he often goes in and out of the school's mental health counseling center. Now Donald is an old man in his seventies. Although he has a much better temper, he often has some hallucinations, such as the fact that he thinks he is the child of an octopus.

It turned out that six of the ten sons in the family were suffering from schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a very special mental illness with symptoms including auditory hallucinations and hallucinations. Although some non-human animals develop symptoms of mental illness, only Homo sapiens suffer from schizophrenia, which may be related to the complex history of human evolution, according to the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai.

Joel Dudley, a researcher at Mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, pointed out that schizophrenia is relatively high in human society, with about 1% of adults suffering from schizophrenia. According to data released by the World Health Organization (WHO) in January 2022, there are 24 million people with schizophrenia worldwide.

You know, 1% of the incidence does not fall into the category of rare diseases. For example, under the Orphan drugs Act (Orphan Drug Act) of 1983, rare diseases refer to an incidence of less than 1/200000, that is, less than 0.0005%.

Although the incidence is high, researchers have never found the root cause of schizophrenia.

In the "ancient" era of psychiatric research, Freud believed that schizophrenia was not hereditary, but caused by childhood trauma. For a long time, researchers believed that schizophrenia was the fault of mothers, who either overdid or did not do enough to raise their children.

This view, known in academia as the schizophrenic mother (schizophrenogenic mother), was put forward by German-American psychotherapist Frida Fromm Frishman (Frieda Fromm-Reichmann) in 1948. Because of Felichmann's influence, many people accepted this hypothesis.

The heredity of schizophrenia was not taken seriously until 1975.

That year, Seymour Kety, who later became the first dean of the National Institute of Mental Health (National Institute of Mental Health), and his colleagues published a major study.

The subjects of this study are a group of adopted children in Denmark. The study found that the biological mothers of these adopted children were more likely to develop the same disease if they had schizophrenia, but whether the adoptive parents had schizophrenia did not affect their risk of developing the disease. This shows that schizophrenia has a certain heredity.

However, the impact of the environment cannot be completely ruled out. Robert Freedman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, said that famine or infection during pregnancy is a high risk factor for schizophrenia in children, which has long been common in the field of schizophrenia research.

Whether schizophrenia is congenital or acquired has been debated in academic circles.

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychiatry (DSM), a psychiatric classification tool written by the American Psychiatric Association and regarded as the Bible in the field of psychiatric treatment, also redefines schizophrenia in each edition.

Now the latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) regards schizophrenia as a pedigree, meaning that most people are more or less prone to schizophrenia, but some people are particularly prominent at the other end of the coordinate system, just as "autism" later turned into "autism spectrum disorder".

The emergence of the Galvin family makes this research field full of fog see a glimmer of hope.

This condition in which a large number of patients occur in a family is called multiple pedigree (multiplex families). But even in multiple families, the Galvin family is special because there is no record of such a high intra-family incidence in the past.

The root cause of schizophrenia is that genetic researchers quickly gathered around the Galvin family.

Lynn DeLisi, now a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was one of the first to study the Galvin family. DeLisi thought there was a genetic link to schizophrenia, which was very advanced at the time.

After more than 40 years of research, in 2016, she and her colleagues found a related gene: SHANK2, in nine families, including the Galvin family, with at least three schizophrenic patients.

SHANK2 encodes proteins on the synapses of neurons, and SHANK2 has previously been linked to autism spectrum disorders, mental retardation and other neurological disorders. This may be an important reason why there are so many schizophrenics in these families.

Robert Freedman, a researcher at the University of Colorado at Denver, has also done a lot of research on the Galvin family.

Freedman points out that researchers have narrowed the range of genes associated with schizophrenia to 150 mutations. Personally, he not only found a gene highly associated with schizophrenia, but also got a substance that might treat schizophrenia.

He found that schizophrenia is associated with the gene CHRNA7. The CHRNA7 gene is involved in embryonic brain development and can express a nicotine receptor.

In fact, people with schizophrenia tend to be heavy smokers because cigarettes seem to calm them down. The connection of the two phenomena gave Freedman an idea, and he thought of a substance associated with nicotine: choline.

Choline is an essential nutrient for the normal growth, development and maintenance of various functions of the human body, and it is also closely related to nicotine receptors. Choline activates nicotine receptors during embryonic brain development. He believes that if pregnant women take choline, it may help alleviate or inhibit the early course of schizophrenia.

If choline is shown to contain schizophrenia in the future, it will be a great milestone, because until now there is no specific cure for schizophrenia.

In fact, in the 1980s, there were some drugs that were once regarded as major milestones in the field of psychiatry, such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and clozapine (Clozapine). But these drugs seem to only relieve symptoms, do not cure schizophrenia, or even reduce the risk of relapse.

Since the 1980s, Freedman has tested choline, and he has given choline to some pregnant women. In a few years, when the children born to mothers taking choline will reach adulthood, they will provide valuable data on the value of choline.

Although key evidence has not yet emerged, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is very optimistic about the drug. In 2015, the U. S. Food and Drug Administration began advising pregnant women to take choline to pr