Nato Secretary General Lord Robertson is condemning the terrorist attacks on America as an affront to everything the 19-nation alliance stands for. An Australian psychiatrist made the claim after treating 12 women experiencing symptoms of the mental illness with oestrogen skin patches and risperidone. Patients taking oestrogen had less severe schizophrenia compared with 12 similar women who received only risperidone.
Schizophrenia strikes roughly one in a hundred men and women.
Those affected can suffer hallucinations, delusions and jumbled thoughts. Antipsychotic drugs such as risperidone help some patients, but many remain severely afflicted. Jayashri Kulkarni, a psychiatrist at the Dandenong Psychiatry Research Centre in Melbourne, says the dose of oestrogen was roughly twice as high as the dose found in common contraceptive pills. Researchers have suspected for a while that oestrogen helps protect against schizophrenia, because women suffer a milder version of the disease than men and it usually strikes them later in life. Studies in animals suggest that oestrogen alters the activity of dopamine and serotonin, two brain chemicals that are disrupted in schizophrenia.