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by pkoird·3y ago·view on hn ↗
It is remarkable how I keep on stumbling upon connections between Scizophrenia and Gut Bacterias and it is equally remarkable, the connection now being discovered between Gut Bacterias and Auto Immune disorders. And now when I find such anecdotes between possible connections of Auto Immune disorders and Schizophrenia, it just blows my mind to see how every thing is just connected to one another. This demonstrates just how much we still do not understand and on a more positive note, just how much we can in future.
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As a barely related tangential thought: I've wanted to write a short science-fiction story about an alien life-form slowly colonizing our planet by invading human gut micro-biome through our diet. Through this process they alter our food preferences to choose diets most conducive to their own flourishing and then eventually effect our minds. We become convinced that diet choices are for the benefit of our own health but in reality we are eating foods that really benefit the alien bacteria in our guts.

The idea is very roughly based on the cat poop parasite (Toxoplasma gondii) that is theorized to alter human brain chemistry to change risk-taking behavior.

When I hear a person say their thoughts are being controlled by microscopic creatures living inside them, I won't write it off as a paranoid delusion. I'll hear them out.
If this is a causal relationship, how can we explain the apparent heritability of schizophrenia? Some cursory Googling shows 79% heritability found in one Danish study.

https://www.healthline.com/health/is-schizophrenia-hereditar...

Agreed, however a massive fallacy in science is that the more people keep repeating “hypotheses”, the more likely you are to be persuaded by spurious results / false positives. With enough attention large scale statistical analysis should be able to define clear causal effects, but we often just see weak results about “maybes” and “might bes”.
and yet no viable, actionable treatment has come about from these connections despite them being around for a decade or more