Will the real madness please stand up, I repeat...
This is the true definition of madness
I have already mentioned the famous Mr Graham on this site many times, this page is really to do with something that he told us about...
You can find the original article for this in the 31 July 1999 New Scientist, there was also an article in the 20 August 1999 edition of The Editor. I have edited and added literary references to this one...
As summer days heat up, so do summer lovers. There they are, at the beach, in the store, on the corner - couples who stand so close and stare so longingly that you blush just watching them. It's love. It's perfect, sweet - it's so definately sick.
Songwriters have long crooned that love is insane. But scientists now have a more precise name for it: obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). Made famous ny checkers and washers - people who check and recheck the door to be sure it's locked, or repeatedly try to wash away germs (rather like Lady Macbeth) - OCD endlessly nags sufferers with intrusive thoughts. Heeding these thoughts, people suffering OCD feel compelled to repeat mundane activities or chase risky thrills, like gambling. That may not sound like blissful love, but some psychiatrists that passion's thrills resemble OCD's angst, both in habits and the brain's inner chemistry. Love is just a lot more fun. What's more, these researchers say, the pathology of romance may have a pivotal role in our evolution. It all started in 1990, when Donatella Marazziti, a psychiatrist at the univeristy of Pisa in Italy, began looking for biochemical explanations for OCD. One chief suspect was the neurotransmitter serotonin - a chemical that has a soothing effect on the brain. Too little serotonin has been linked to aggression, depression and anxiety; drugs in the Prozac family fight these conditions by boosting the chemical's presence in the brain. So Marazziti set out to measure serotonin in people with OCD. Tracking chemicals inside the brain is tricky, so he settled on a simpler technique: calculating the amount of serotonin in platelets, tiny cells are easily retrieved from an ordinary blood sample. In blood platelets, serotomin plays a totally different role - aiding clotting - but moves about in much the same way as it does in the brain. Which means that scientists can gauge roughly how much serotonin is skipping about in your head from the levels of related proteins in platelets. It may be an indirect measure, explains molecular biologist Dean Hamer of the National Cancer Institute (NCI) near Washington DC - but it can hint at how relavent the chemical is to different forms of behaviour.
And, as Marazziti predicted, she found evidence that serotonin levels were unusually low in people with OCD. But she also discovered something surprising. Interviewing these patients, Marazziti was struck by the way their persistant one-track thoughts mirrored the musings of people in love. Throughout the day, both the people with OCD and the lovestruck can spend hours fixating on a certain object or that certain someone. What's more, noth groups often know their obsessions are somehow irrational, yet they can't snap out of them. Marazziti had to wonder, if serotonin dips dangerously low in OCD, could it be doing the same when people fall in love?
To find out, Marazziti's team went looking for love. They pinned advertisments around the univeristy of Pisa medical school asking for students who had fallen in love within the past 6 months and who had obsessed about their new love for at least 4 hours every day but who had not celebrated the relationship with sex. They wanted to find Romeos and Juliets whose fresh passion had neither been hormonally jumbled by sex nor dulled by time. 17 women and 3 men with an average age of 24, signed up. Separately, the scientists recruited 20 people who met the basic criteria for OCD and another 20 free from the grip of either love or psychiatric disorder.
Blood samples were taken from each member of each group, and then spun in a centrifuge to separate out first the plasma, and next the tiny platelets. While the "normal" students had the usual level of serotonin, both the OCD and in love participants had about 40% less of the chemical, as estimated by the amount of activity of a serotonin transporter protein in their blood platelets. "It's often said that when you're in love, you're a little bit crazy", Marazziti says. "That may be true".
To confirm their hunch that serotonin plummets solely during the love's first flush - and not later on - the researchers retested 6 of the original 20 in-love students a year hence. Sure enough, the students' serotonin levels had bounced back to normal, while a more subtle affection for their partner had replaced their original giddiness.According to previus studies, the same "evening out" of emotion happens to OCD patients who tke drugs that boost serotonin levels to normal.
The offbeat study, just published in the jounal "Psychological Medicine", has researchers applauding, chucking - and wondering whether this is a tentative step towards some interesting conclusions about life and love
The new findings may explain some quirks of human behaviou too - such as why we feel unusually passionate after downing a few pints.
Some books about madness are The Changeling and Hamlet
To be continued...
