Genetic Schizophrenia Risk

"Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder . . . characterized by hallucinations, delusions and cognitive deficits."

[G]enetic factors, estimated to account for 80 percent of the total risk of getting schizophrenia . . . . a person with schizophrenia probably has hundreds or thousands of risk-increasing variants. . . .

[E]ach of . . . three studies compared several thousand DNA samples from people diagnosed with schizophrenia with samples from thousands of others, some healthy and some with other diseases. Association studies are designed to find single letter differences, called SNPs, at many points along the DNA. Such variants popping up more frequently in the schizophrenia patients’ DNA are presumed to markers of regions of the genome that contribute to the disease.

Many thousands of common DNA variants (those found in about 5 percent of the total population) turned up more often in people with schizophrenia . . . . On their own, each variant identified in the new studies raises the risk of schizophrenia just slightly — from 1 percent (the risk in the general population) to, in some cases, around 1.2 percent. Collectively, common variants may account for about a third of the overall genetic risk of schizophrenia. . . . Other factors that contribute to genetic risk include variations in the number of copies of certain genes and rare but high-risk variants of specific DNA letters. . . .

Although few of the variants could be identified conclusively . . . some of the variants were found in stretches of the genome previously linked to schizophrenia. Such regions occurred near genes involved in the formation of brain cell connections and genes involved in controlling the activity of other genes. . . . DNA variations in a region of chromosome 6 called the major histocompatibility complex were also found in the schizophrenia patients’ DNA . . . This region contains genes that make proteins that are important for immune system function. Earlier studies have suggested a link between disruptions in the immune system with a heightened risk of schizophrenia. . . .

If the link between immunity and schizophrenia is confirmed, treatments for autoimmune diseases may also prove useful for alleviating the psychiatric disease, . . . currently only 30 to 40 percent of schizophrenia patients respond well to treatments.

From here.

Schizophrenia is increasingly looking like the mental health equivalent of friction, the cumulative effect of lots of little issues.

The variation frequency model is consistent with the empirical fact that prevalence of schizophrenia is more even than many heavily genetic conditions. Prevalence a condition with many more or less independent genetic sources is evened out by the law of averages; prevalence of a condition caused by a few key genes should vary more from population to population. It is also consistent with the empirical evidence that schitzophrenia is paternal age related, which would suggest that a variety of random genetic mutations can make it more likely. One would not expect age related mutations to be tied to a small number of specific SNPs, but would expect it to be tied to the overall number of mutations in a person's genome.

The report I read did not identify any "typing" that distinguishes, for example, between the genetic issues in treatment responsive schizophrenia, and those in individuals not responsive to drugs. The studies are suggestive, however, of the possibility that schizophrenia might be a matter of degree rather than an all or nothing affair. Someone with 500 risk producing variants might be prone, all other things being equal, to have a milder case of schizophrenia than someone with 5000 risk producing variants.

One of the studies also suggested that cumulative component of genetic risk (but not the immune system component of genetic risk) may overlap between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Very Theoretical Law Scholarship

Despite the fact that my dear wife taught Women's Studies to college students shortly before and after we got married, I remain stunned at the breadth of topics that constitute legal scholarship. For example, this recent article:

This Article elaborates some aspects of everyday naming practices involving social identity and kinship, in order to assist us in understanding the injury that comes from mandating two distinct names for the core family relationship. It considers (1) the problem of family identity underlying Juliet’s 'What’s in a name' soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet; (2) Louis Althusser’s concept of interpellation; (3) the feminist critique of language and names, focusing in particular on the 'Miss'/'Mrs.'/'Ms.' controversy; and (4) the way in which concrete, diffuse, everyday social practices of naming and recognition are multiscalar, and interact with larger legal and social structures around recognition, dominance, and subordination. With these considerations in mind, it is easier to see that the 'civil union'/'marriage' distinction has a cultural meaning that will create a stigmatic injury by reinforcing and activating dormant, dispersed sites of stereotyping and prejudice against gays and lesbians.

-- Abstract, Marc R. Poirier (Seton Hall University - School of Law), "Name Calling: Identifying Stigma and the 'Civil Union'/'Marriage' Distinction" (Connecticut Law Review, Vol. 41, 2009).

I'm pretty sure that I haven't used the word "multiscalar" since I taught myself linear algebra in high school, if ever, and I'm not at all convinced that it means that same thing in this context. Still, it is interesting the someone writes about this for a living and that someone else decided to published it.

My own scholarly interests run more to this article on the failure of judicial reform in Mongolia, an interest which is also a function of having spent time with a Mongolian exchange student who is involved in the Mongolian legislative process not so long ago.

Also, fascinating is a recent paper by Harry Surden of the University of Colorado Law School, whose abstract begins:

This Essay challenges the view that privacy interests are protected primarily by law. Instead, I argue that much of society's privacy is protected implicitly by transaction costs.

The article goes on to argue that the demises of transaction costs as a result of new technologies makes legal regulation of privacy that was previously unnecessary due to transaction cost burdens appropriate to consider now.

Little Known History At Unbossed

* Communism in the United States, complete with mass demonstrations by renters and the unemployed, was a much more notable political movement than it is now during the Great Depression. The conclusion to the article argues that FDR was supported by this mass movement. I come away with a new appreciation for why business interests tolerated the New Deal, in the face of what seemed like a much more radical alternative from the communists. The history also makes the Red Scare after World War II, whose leaders are generally demonized (with good reason), easier to understand.

The history is also reassuring. While the public is unhappy with the current financial crisis associated recession, it is clear that we are nowhere close to the conditions that prevailed during the Great Depression, yet, at any rate.

* The other shocker, seemingly right out of a conspiracy theory, except for the pedigree of its proponents, is about the source of the recent swine flu epidemic.

A paper published in the New England Journal of Medicine suggests that the virus responsible for the ongoing H1N1 "swine flu" pandemic is the result of a laboratory accident that occurred around 1977, "possibly somewhere in Asia or the Soviet Union." Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh noticed that the H1N1 strain responsible for the devastating 1918 pandemic continued to circulate, human to human, until 1957. For the next twenty years, the H1N1 strain seemingly disappeared as other flu strains took its place. Then, in 1977, H1N1 re-emerged in China, Hong Kong and the USSR. (Telegraph, June 30, 2009)

The authors concluded that the strain responsible for the 1977 outbreak "had been preserved since 1950." The likely cause of its re-emergence was "an accidental release from a laboratory source in the setting of waning population immunity to H1 and N1 antigens."

In other words, "swine flu" isn't just like the deadly Spanish flu of 1918, it is the Spanish flu of 1918.

* While not historical, a reminder that 90% of people on a secret U.S. government watch list of terrorists in the United States are able to buy guns illustrates just worthless this list is in real life. In a five year period from 2004-2009, there were 963 terrorist watch list matches. About 10% were denied permission to buy guns.

Tax Havens Good?

A recent report argues that tax havens are good, ranking the OECD countries with that philosophy in mind.

Unsurprisingly, I am not impressed with the argument which mostly boils down to "taxes are oppressive."

Leverage Regulation Works

Was the Financial Crisis proof that regulation is incapable of preventing economic harm? No. It proved the opposite.

Commercial banking and thrift and credit union regulation didn't fail. Yes, a few dozen of these institutions, only a handful big and none "too big to fail" collapsed. Yes, a few dozen more have had bailout funds more or less forced upon them -- including a handful of "too big to fail institutions" some of whom probably needed the funds. But, these industries, because of FDIC type reserve requirements in the case of banks and thrifts, and the incentives created by depositor ownership in the case of credit unions and also downside risk concerns in the case of regional family owned banks, were not rocked to the core.

In contrast, non-bank lenders who are subject only to imperfect SEC/CFTC/FTC disclosure regulation and unregulated private transaction financial players regulated only by contract law and 10b-5 anti-fraud rules, utterly collapsed. Not a single free standing major investment bank survived as a free standing investment bank. Something like 95% of subprime lenders went out of business and both subprime lending and Alt-A lending virtually ceased to exist. Even sound mortgage backed securities were tainted by complex ones. Credit default swaps, supported by chains of CDS "reinsurers" defaulted, and far more would have defaulted if AIG, near the top of the reinsurance pyramid, had not been bailed out and nationalized. The money market came to the brink of a run that would have ruined it.

In short, 99% of reserve requirement regulated financial institutions are still here, while probably a majority of all non-bank, non-government sponsored, non-mutual financial institutions have collapsed or survived solely by dint of government assistance.

The financial crisis has shown that regulation works and that failure to regulate fails. History shows the same thing. The percentage of commercial banks failing in any given two decade period pre-FDIC frequently hit more than 50%. The percentage of commercial banks failing in any given two decade period post-FDIC approached 1%.

The FDIC works like title insurance. It micromanages what it insures in the ways that matter in advance, so that it doesn't have to clean up afterwards. The micromanagement isn't comprehensive: the FDIC basically micromanages only a couple things that matter to its insurance obligation -- reserve requirements (and there only at the bottom line level) and permitted transactions/investments (commercial banks can't go bet depositors money on the stock market no matter how sure a thing it seems to be).

But, mere transparency isn't sufficient, and transparancy also isn't necessary if substantive regulation is sufficient (banks make very little substantive disclosure of particular transactions which come under the rubric of banking privacy, despite the fact that they have the theoretical capacity to hide immense risk as they did in the mortgage backed security industry). Empirically, the SEC/Truth-In-Lending "disclosure is enough" formula of regulation simply does not work, standing alone. You either need to regulate the variables that can make a government feel it would need to do a bailout (mostly leverage), or you need to create better incentives (a la credit unions, mutual insurance companies and non-profit lenders; the Department of Education, Small Business Administration, FHA and VA didn't indulge in risky, poorly documented lending and loan guarantee underwriting in their respective subfields, for example).

When banks do get into trouble, the FDIC has another tool that has saved taxpayers (in the short term) and FDIC premium payers (i.e. banks) in the long term, huge sums of money, while protecting the vast majority of uninsured deposits as well. It has the power to make pre-bankruptcy loans that have the priority over other creditors of post-bankruptcy debtor-in-possession lending, and the ability to quickly sell the assets of troubled institutions free and clear of creditor claims without a full fledged bankruptcy (a bit like the Chrysler sale to Fiat), in a way that stiffs shareholders and some long term creditors, but protects trade creditors and depositors.

The Fed didn't have these powers in the Lehman case, perceived, not necessarily rightly as a key domino that collapsed, and these FDIC powers are the ones the Obama Plan obliquely mentions and delegated to regulatory wonks and Congressional staff to implment in detail, when it talks about given the Fed power to intervene pre-bankruptcy in non-bank situations.

Regulating leverage, either directly, like the FDIC and the Fed do with commercial banks and thrifts, or indirectly, though improved incentives that better align the incentives of people who use other people's money with the incentives of those who are providing it, is a key element of any regulatory program to make our economy more robust.