People who are blind from birth never develop schizophrenia

lurquer

“…tracking nearly half a million children born in Western Australia between 1980 and 2001. Of those, 1,870 developed schizophrenia, but not one of the 66 children with cortical blindness did.” Using this data, one would expect to see only 0.25 cases in those 66 blind kids. Stated differently, there is around a 78% chance of having 0 cases in those 66 by random chance alone. Dumb.

hyperhello

Off topic, but do deaf people ever hear voices?

altairprime

Huh. I wonder if that means my inability to visualize mentally means I’m partly/fully defended against it? That would explain a subgroup prevalence!

shirro

My understanding is that auditory hallucinations are more common in schizophrenia which makes this more of a WTF. Aphantasiac here so this raises an obvious question. Cursory search suggests visual hallucinations due to drugs or schizophrenia are reported. Conscious and involuntary visualisation seem to be somewhat independent.

SideQuark

> The most rigorous evidence comes from a 2018 whole-population study tracking nearly half a million children born in Western Australia between 1980 and 2001. Of those, 1,870 developed schizophrenia, but not one of the 66 children with cortical blindness did. 1870/500,000 * 66 = 0.247 Not a single blind child getting it is the most likely outcome, and this is called "the most rigorous evidence"? It didn't protect rats in a study https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S09209... There sure is a lot of reported cases of all sorts of blindness with schizophrenia, constantly shrinking the pool of types of the two, making this conjecture constantly shrinking https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4246684/ It also seems the Australia study does not quite say what the article claims it does - a follow-up study: https://jmsgr.tamhsc.edu/the-lack-of-comorbidity-between-ear... Too bad this article simply doesn't mention all this. Of course the article will get less clicks with a less wild title.