This family has 12 beautiful children and 6 schizophrenias, and this disease unique to humans is actually very high

Written by Seven Kings

Dad was an Air Force officer, mom was loving and optimistic, and they had 12 children. It sounds like a happy family. But who could have predicted that half of the 12 children suffered from schizophrenia, and the disease was all boys, who unfortunately accompanied the family for half a century. But through this peculiar family, researchers see the dawn of a cure for schizophrenia, a unique disease that belongs only to Homo sapiens.

11 children in the Galvin family (1 in mom's belly). Image source: hidden-valley-road.com

The Galvin family lives in Colorado, and his father, Don Galvin, an officer at the Air Force Academy, has 12 children with his wife, Mimi, the oldest child, Donald, born in 1945 and mary, the youngest, in 1965.

Parents of the Galvin family: Mom Mimi (1st from left and 2nd from left) and Dad Don (1st from right). Image source: hidden-valley-road.com

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

The eldest son, Donald, was brilliant for the first two decades of his life, a high school football star and wrestler, and had dated the daughter of a U.S. Air Force Academy general. But when he went to college, all the good things began to fall apart.

Eldest son Donald. Image source: hidden-valley-road.com

In his 20s, he would do something out of the ordinary at school, such as suddenly breaking all the plates, jumping into a campfire or repeatedly abusing cats. He also knew he had problems and was therefore frequented by the school's mental health counselling centre. Now Donald is in his seventies. Although his temper is much better, he often has some hallucinations, such as the fact that he thinks he is an octopus child.

What is even more unexpected is that other boys in the family have also developed mental abnormalities. Joseph often saw the Emperor of China in the sky talking to him. Jim often self-harms and also assaults his younger siblings. Brian killed his girlfriend in 1973 and then committed suicide. The other two brothers, Matthew and Peter, were slightly better off, but they were both diagnosed with the same disease.

It turned out that 6 of the family's 10 sons were suffering from schizophrenia.

The Galvin family, 1st from right and 2nd from right, is Don Galvin and Mimi, and 1 child has yet to be born. Image credit: Penguin Random House

Schizophrenia is a very specific mental illness with symptoms including auditory hallucinations and hallucinations. According to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, although some non-human animals will have symptoms of mental illness, only Homo sapiens species will suffer from schizophrenia, which may be related to the complex evolutionary history of humans.

Joel Dudley, a researcher at mount Sinai Icahn School of Medicine, points 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, the 1% incidence does not fall into the category of rare diseases. For example, under the Orphan Drug Act of 1983, rare diseases refer to an incidence of less than one in 200,000, or less than 0.0005%.

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

Image source: max pixel

In the "antiquity" era of psychiatric research, Freud believed that schizophrenia was not hereditary, but brought about by childhood trauma. For a long time, researchers believed that schizophrenia was the fault of mothers, who either overdoed or did not do enough when raising their children.

This view, known in academia as the schizophrenogenic mother, was proposed in 1948 by the German-American psychotherapist Frieda Fromm-Reichmann. Because of Frichmann's influence, many people accepted the hypothesis.

The hereditary nature of schizophrenia was not taken seriously until 1975.

That year, Seymour Kety, who later became the first president of the National Institute of Mental Health, and colleagues published a blockbuster study.

The study was conducted on 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 in their home did not affect their chances of developing the disease. This indicates that schizophrenia has a certain hereditary nature.

However, environmental impacts cannot be completely excluded. Robert Freedman, a professor of psychiatry at the University of Colorado, said that mothers suffering from famine or infection during pregnancy are high-risk factors for children's schizophrenia, which has long been recognized in the field of schizophrenia research.

Image credit: pixabay

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

The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a psychiatric disorder classification tool written by the American Psychiatric Association and used as the "bible" in the treatment of mental illness, also redefines schizophrenia in each edition of the change.

The latest edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) sees schizophrenia as a spectrum, meaning that most people have some schizophrenic tendencies, except that some are particularly prominent at the other end of the coordinate system, just as the original "autism" was later transformed into "autism spectrum disorder" .

The emergence of the Galvin family gave a glimmer of hope to this field of research that was full of fog.

This type of situation in which many patients appear in a family is called multiplex families. But even in the multifaring family, the Galvin family is special because there is no such high intra-family incidence recorded in the past literature.

6 boys in the Galvin family. Image source: hidden-valley-road.com

Researchers who insisted that the root cause of schizophrenia lay in heredity soon gathered around the Galvin family.

Lynn DeLisi, now a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, was one of the pioneers in the first study of the Galvin family. DeLisi believed that schizophrenia was related to genes, which was very advanced at the time.

Image source: wikimedia

After more than four decades of research, and finally in 2016, she and her colleagues discovered a related gene in nine households, including the Galvin family, with at least 3 people with schizophrenia: SHANK2.

SHANK2 encodes proteins on neuronal synapses, and SHANK2 has also been previously found to be associated with autism spectrum disorders, intellectual disabilities, and other neurological disorders. This may be an important reason why so many schizophrenics appear in these families.

Robert Freedman, a researcher at the University of Colorado denver mentioned above, has also conducted extensive research on the Galvin family.

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

He found that schizophrenia was linked to the gene CHRNA7. The CHRNA7 gene is involved in the brain development of the embryo and can express a nicotine receptor.

Do not imitate. Image source: wikimedia

In fact, people with schizophrenia are often old smoking guns, because cigarettes seem to calm them down. The concatenation of the two phenomena gave Freedman an idea of a substance associated with nicotine: choline.

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

If choline proves to be able to curb schizophrenia in the future, it will be a great milestone, because until now there is no specific drug for schizophrenia.

In fact, in the 1980s, a number of drugs that had been considered major milestones in the field of psychiatry emerged, such as chlorpromazine (Thorazine) and clozapine . But these drugs don't seem to relieve symptoms, not cure schizophrenia, or even reduce the chances of recurrence.

Since the 1980s, Freedman has experimented with choline, which he has given to some pregnant women. Years later, the children born to mothers taking choline will become adults, at which point they will provide valuable data on the value of choline.

Eggs and animal livers are rich in choline. Image source: max pixel

Although key evidence has not yet emerged, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is very optimistic about the drug. In 2015, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration began recommending that pregnant women take choline to protect the mental health of the fetus. Women in pregnancy can also supplement with choline-rich foods, such as eggs and animal livers.

For the Galvin family, if researchers can find in themselves useful answers for all of humanity, the suffering will eventually be meaningful.

Trivia: There may not be as many spiritual guys in the world as there are nervous guys.