If you're online, you've probably heard jokes about Toxoplasma gondii, a parasites that humans can catch from cat feces.
There is some evidence that the parasites can cause psychological issues in humans, or even spur them to love cats more. It makes a great metaphor. The way we treat our cats has become shorthand for the madness of being a cat lover.
The plot is getting more complicated. There may be some weight to the often-misunderstood theories surrounding toxoplasmosis and neurological health, particularly as it relates to being around cats during childhood, according to a new study.
Futurism spoke to a resident of the psychiatry department at the University of Montreal, who recently published a paper in the Journal of Psychiatric Research which found a correlation between owning a cat in childhood.
The conversation has been edited to make it clearer.
What is the headline of this research?
The headline should not be the easy answer. It shouldn't be that cat exposure causes psychosis. That is something that our study cannot demonstrate.
Cats may be a risk factor for psychotic experiences in adulthood. Cats are associated with more psychotic experiences in men. That could be the headline.
How did you come to do this kind of research?
VP: I was looking for a new research mentor when I started my residency. I started working with Suzanne King, who is a professor and researcher. Pregnant stress is a risk factor for psychosis. She recruited 2000 people in downtown Montreal and asked them about their environmental exposures, including cat ownership, smoking and head injuries.
This study was part of a larger effort to look at genetic and environmental factors in psychosis. Both nature and nurture. There was a question about cat ownership and whether the cat hunted rodents, which was based on the literature on the Toxoplasma gondii parasites. When I started working with Suzanne, she told me there was data that we hadn't published or analyzed, so I agreed to tackle it.
What do people think about your study?
VP: I think people jump from the association that we found, which is a statistical association between two questions that we asked in the survey, right? People jump to the conclusion that it is evidence of causality. We are suggesting that having a cat in childhood is causing psychosis, and then criticize the article. That isn't what we want to communicate. We want to be careful in our conclusion.
On the other hand, we think it is worth investigating further. It is a difficult question to investigate. We don't want to do a randomized control trial where we expose a number of people to find out what the effects are going to be and compare them to other people. We can do that. Other kinds of research methods have strengths and weaknesses. Our study had some limitations.
It adds a new piece of evidence that we didn't have before, which is that the relationship between cat ownership and psychosis seems to be particularly strong when the cat is known to have rodents. The Toxoplasma gondii hypothesis is supported by it. This is what the study is about, raising this hypothesis and encouraging further research in that area. It isn't meant to discourage people from owning cats. The benefits of having a domestic animal that you love and care about were not measured in our study.
Some of the stranger theories surrounding toxoplasmosis are related to an interest in sadomasochistic sex.
It is an important research area. The field of human health impacts of Toxoplasma gondii exposure is what I mean. It is an important research area because the parasites are present in our society. It can have health impacts that are not known.
It's the same for both. We were not aware of the health ramifications of that until we gathered evidence and it became clear that it was a public health issue that had a direct effect on the health of many people. It is the same for Toxoplasma gondii. I think we don't fully understand what it does to human health. The solution might not be to get rid of cats.
Hopefully, it is more about controlling the transmission of the parasites. There are some studies that have found strange relationships. Ours might fall under this umbrella. A body of literature found that people who have had previous exposure to the parasites had a higher risk of car accidents. We don't know if the association is due to other factors that weren't measured in the research. The association from a statistical point of view is strong.
We have to be careful and not make definitive conclusions out of this kind of research, but it still leaves the question open. Is these impacts real? We haven't been able to refute or confirm these questions. We have to be careful not to ask questions that are meant to be provocative or draw attention. Psychosis, car accidents, and cognitive functioning are real outcomes that have implications for people's health and quality of life. I think these research questions should be pursued.
Is there other sources for the parasites beyond cat ownership?
The main sources of the parasites for humans are raw meat and cat feces.
What direction would you like to take this research?
The first study linking cat ownership to psychosis was published in 1995. There haven't been many studies done on this question.
One of the limitations of our study was that we didn't use antibody measures to confirm exposure to the virus, so the next step is to use them. Ideally, we would collect these measures on many occasions over the lifespan, because so far studies that included these measures only said that at some point in their lives, people were exposed to the parasites.
The hypothesis is that exposure in childhood increases the risk of psychosis. In order to examine the hypothesis better, we will need to have repeated measures of antibodies. Being exposed for the first time in childhood, compared with before birth, increases the risk of psychosis. It would be another direction to take in the future.
There are correlations between childhood cat ownership and psychotic experiences in adulthood.
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