Reduced Smell Activity May Point To Schizophrenia Predisposition
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Back to table of contents Previous article Next article Clinical & Research NewsFull AccessReduced Smell Activity May Point To Schizophrenia PredispositionJoan Arehart-TreichelJoan Arehart-TreichelSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:17 Aug 2001https://doi.org/10.1176/pn.36.16.0018aSeveral years ago, Lili Kopala, M.D., a psychiatrist with Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, and her colleagues examined smell acuity in identical twins discordant for schizophrenia. The twins with schizophrenia had considerable olfaction impairment compared with healthy controls, but the twins without schizophrenia had some impairment as well. The unaffected twins’ performance fell midway between that of the affected twins and that of the healthy controls.Fifty-eight percent of patients with schizophrenia, 34 percent of nonschizophrenia subjects from families with schizophrenia, and 9 percent of healthy controls had senses of smell in the impaired range. “Impaired” was defined as a score on the University of Pennsylvania Smell Identification Test of less than 34 of 40 for men and less than 35 of 40 for women. (Source: Lili Kopala, M.D., et al., Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia)This finding made Kopala and her coworkers wonder whether smell impairment might indicate a genetic susceptibility to schizophrenia in persons coming from families with a genetic predisposition to the disease. So they decided to test their hypothesis in another study.The results, reported in the August American Journal of Psychiatry, confirm their hypothesis, Kopala and her colleagues believe.Kopala and her coworkers gave a smell identification test to three groups of subjects younger than age 65. The first group consisted of 19 individuals with schizophrenia who came from families that had had various members with schizophrenia throughout the generations. In other words, it was clear that a strong genetic predisposition to schizophrenia was present in these families.The second group consisted of 27 persons who also came from these families but who did not have schizophrenia. These individuals presumably had some genetic predisposition to schizophrenia as well, but had not developed schizophrenia.A third group consisted of 43 healthy volunteers who were matched for age and gender to each schizophrenia and nonschizophrenia subject; an adequate match for three subjects could not be found.The researchers then compared olfactory test results among the three groups. As they expected, subjects with schizophrenia performed worst on the test, healthy controls best, and subjects without schizophrenia but presumably with some genetic vulnerability to the disease in-between. Specifically, 58 percent of schizophrenia patients, 34 percent of nonschizophrenia subjects, and nine percent of healthy controls performed in the impaired range (see chart).Thus, “impaired olfactory deficits may aggregate in families with schizophrenia and may be indicative of a genetic predisposition to psychosis,” Kopala and her colleagues conclude.The report, “Impaired Olfactory Identification in Relatives of Patients with Familial Schizophrenia,” is posted on the journal’s Web site at ajp.psychiatryonline.org under the August issue.▪ AM J PSYCHIATRY20011581286 ISSUES NewArchived
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".