Correlation-causation. Do crazy cat-ladies go out looking for (possibly
infected) cats or do the cats make them that way? In any case, maybe the
study helps justify the stereotype.
Bill Scott
>>> 07/08/12 2:14 PM >>>
My dog tipped me off to this. She's lobbying to get rid of the cat.
A Parasite Carried By Cats Could Increase Suicide Risk
by Jon Hamilton
05:28 pm
Hans
Martens/iStockphoto.comWhat's the link between cats and madness?
There's fresh evidence that cats can be a threat to your mental health.
To be fair, it's not kitties themselves that are the problem, but a
parasite they carry called Toxoplasma gondii.
A study of more than 45,000 Danish women found that those infected with
this feline parasite were 1.5 times more likely to attempt suicide than
women who weren't infected.
That's not a huge increase, but it's probably too big to have been
caused by chance, says Teodor Postolache, a University of Maryland
psychiatrist and senior author of the paper, which was published in the
Archives of General Psychiatry.
Still, the absolute risk of suicide
remains very small. Fewer than 1,000 of the women attempted any sort of
self-directed violence during the 30-year study span. And just seven
committed suicide.
But this isn't the first time T. gondii infection, or toxoplasmosis, has
been associated with behavioral changes in people, Postolache says.
Previous studies have shown links to schizophrenia, bipolar disorder,
and even the chance that a person will get in an automobile accident.
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Research Links Parasite In Cats To Mental Illnesses
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The T. gondii parasite lives in the intestines of cats. Cat owners can
become infected when they change a litter box, Postolache says. But he
says people are more "People should not give their cats away" because of this
study,
Postolache says.
Scientists still aren't sure how the parasite affects a person's brain,
he says. But in rodents, it causes cysts to form in areas of the brain
involved in behavior.
A study of rats also found that infection caused them to lose their fear
of cats and become attracted to the odor of cat urine. That behavioral
change would increase the chance that a rat would be eaten by a cat —
allowing the parasite to get into the cat's intestine, which is the only
place it can reproduce sexually.
The parasite doesn't benefit much from infecting a human, since cats
don't eat people very often. So humans are probably just "collateral
damage" from the parasites' effort to infect smaller animals, says
Robert Yolken, an infectious disease expert at Johns Hopkins University.
Yolken says he owns two cats and that "the benefits outweigh the risks."
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