Posted on 11/05/2025 8:40:51 PM PST by ConservativeMind
A commonly prescribed antibiotic could help reduce the risk of some young people developing schizophrenia, new research suggests.
Experts found that patients of adolescent mental health services who were treated with the antibiotic doxycycline were significantly less likely to go on to develop schizophrenia in adulthood compared with patients treated with other antibiotics.
Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that typically emerges in early adulthood and is often associated with hallucinations and delusional beliefs.
To better understand potential ways of preventing the condition, researchers applied advanced statistical modeling to large-scale health care register data from Finland.
The team analyzed data from more than 56,000 adolescents attending mental health services who had been prescribed antibiotics. They found that those treated with doxycycline had a 30–35% lower risk of developing schizophrenia than peers who received other antibiotics.
The researchers hypothesized that the protective effect could be linked to doxycycline's impact on inflammation and brain development.
Doxycycline is a broad-spectrum antibiotic commonly used to treat infections and acne. Previous studies suggest it can reduce inflammation in brain cells and influence synaptic pruning—a natural process where the brain refines its neural connections. Excessive pruning has been associated with the development of schizophrenia.
Further analyses showed that the lower risk wasn't simply because the young people may have been treated for acne rather than having infections, and was unlikely to be explained by other hidden differences between the groups.
Professor Ian Kelleher said, "As many as half of the people who develop schizophrenia had previously attended child and adolescent mental health services for other mental health problems.
"At present, though, we don't have any interventions that are known to reduce the risk of going on to develop schizophrenia in these young people. That makes these findings exciting.
(Excerpt) Read more at medicalxpress.com ...
It can even help with eye styes, in very low doses.
Use of it was associated with a greatly reduced likelihood of schizophrenia.
that seems weird. Why would an antibiotic do this? They say it could be about information but there are far better things to take for inflammation. Antibiotics can save that your life, but there can also be a lot of negative health consequences. And current misuse of antibiotics is leading to resistance.
Doxycycline has a particular side effect with some patients:
It can produce a severe bout of Dry Mouth. All your mucous membranes can hold that parched feeling for a couple of hours. Drinking water can help but not prevent for the next time.
Doxcycline doesn’t work nearly as well as amoxicillin for sinus infections. Actually, it doesn’t seem to work at all.
I gotta wonder if they ever tested it on bi-polar 1 and 2 disorder?
Perhaps some mental illnesses can be caused by parasites.
Doxicycline is effective against toxoplasmosis.
Toxoplasmosis is a disease you get from cat poop. It invades the brain.
There is a link between toxoplasmosis and lots of mental illness— crazy cat lady stereotype comes from this.
I am extremely confident I just figured this out.
Don’t tell our feline overlords...
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