sCHIZOPHRENIA

Vocabulary

Directions: Try to guess the meaning of the highlighted words based on your knowledge of English. In each set of words, choose the two words that have similar meanings to the words in bold letters on the left. Use your dictionary if necessary. The first one has been done for you.

paternal Answer a and c	a. father’s side	b. kindly	c. male side
quest Answer a and b	a. search	b. hunt	c. pursuit
maintain Answer b and c	a. argue	b. look after	c. take care of
maternal Answer a and b	a. motherly	b. mother’s side	c. female side
related Answer a and b	a. associated	b. connected	c. told
risk Answer a and c	a. chance	b. threat	c. possibility
reproduce Answer a and c	a. give birth	b. replicate	c. produce
digest Answer b and c	a. process	b. understand	c. comprehend
induce Answer a and b	a. produce	b. cause	c. persuade
substitute Answer b and c	a. alternate	b. switch	c. replace with

Rapid Reading Warm-Up (30 Seconds)

Directions: The exercise below has 25 problems that will help you read faster. You will have only 30 seconds to finish. You will probably not finish all 25 problems, but you are to work as quickly as you can. Be careful not to make any errors, so read rapidly but carefully. In this exercise, there are six words: one word to the left of the line and five to the right. Read the word on the left and then find it among the five words to the right.

Example

raft	rift	rate	raft	rote	reef
1. dream	drain	dram	dreams	dream	dreamed
2. physics	physical	physican	physics	physicians	psycho
3. college	collage	colleague	college	colleges	collide
4. mania	manic	main	maniacal	mania	mean
5. applied	appliqué	applies	applied	appliance	apply
6. solely	soul	soil	silly	solely	sail
7. parent	parrot	parent	portent	patent	pared
8. quarter	quart	quiver	quarters	quarter	quarry
9. mutate	mutate	mutant	mutated	mutation	mutations
10. paternal	patter	pattern	paternity	portent	paternal
11. consult	consult	consultant	consulted	consult	consolidate
12. suggest	suggestions	suggest	suggesting	suggestible	suggestion
13. diagnose	diagnose	diagnoses	diagnosing	diagnosis	diagnosed
14. develop	development	developing	develops	deployed	develop
15. seems	seams	seemed	same	sesame	seems
16. digest	divest	divide	digestion	digest	digressed
17. genetics	genetics	generally	geneticists	genome	geneticist
18. repair	report	replay	relay	repair	repairs
19. synonym	spandex	sympathy	syndrome	synonym	symphony
20. lies	lies	lives	loves	leads	lows
21. precurse	precede	precursor	preceptor	pretend	prepare
22. divided	division	dividend	dander	dreamed	divided
23. sperm	squirm	spark	spermicide	sperm	spear
24. replicate	replete	replicates	relocate	replicate	relearn
25. rise	rose	ruse	rite	rise	raise

First Reading (3 Minutes for Reading)

Directions: Starting with the first sentence of the passage, read as quickly as you can for three minutes.

Second Reading (3 Minutes)

Directions: Starting with the first sentence of the passage, read as quickly as you can for three minutes.

Third Reading (3 Minutes)

Directions: Starting with the first sentence of the passage, read as quickly as you can for three minutes. 

Fourth Reading (3 Minutes)

Directions: Starting with the first sentence of the passage, read as quickly as you can for three minutes. 

The Biology of Schizophrenia: The Seeds of Psychosis

by Josie Glausius

Eileen Malaspina dreamed of becominga physician. But in 1971, during her senior year in high school, her grades began to deteriorate. She became increasingly withdrawn and complained that the neighbors were talking about her. After graduation she entered not the college to which she had won a scholarship but a hospital. Diagnosed with schizo-affective disorder, a devastating mix of mania, depression, and psychosis, she never made it to medical school. But her only sister, Dolores, did. Now a psychiatrist at Columbia University and the New York State Psychiatric Institute, Dolores Malaspina applied to study medicine with one aim: to understand the illness that afflicts her younger sister.

Schizophrenia is believed to be solely a disease of the brain. But in an ironic twist, Malaspina’s quest for understanding – one that has taken her around the world – has led the right back to a parent. Only this time it’s the father. Malaspina has found that about a quarter of all schizophrenics may owe their symptoms to spontaneous mutations in paternal sperm. And the older the father, the more likely his sperm is to carry such mutations.

Malaspina consulted a national registry of mental illness maintained since 1950. At the time, isolated reports suggested that the youngest children in families have the highest risk of developing schizophrenia, but the reason for the trend was unclear. After poring over (Question 15) the medical records of more than 87,000 people born between 1964 and 1976 – 658 of whom had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or closely related psychoses – Malaspina reached a startling (Question 16) conclusion. Whereas one out of every 121 children born to men in their late twenties had developed schizophrenia by the age of 34, one of every 47 children born to men age 50 to 54 developed the disease. In other words, after age 50, a man’s risk of having schizophrenic offspring seems to be more than twice that of a man who reproduces in his late twenties.

Malaspina’s results were so surprising that some of her colleagues found them hard to digest. “Reproductive scientists in my department said ‘It can’t be,’” she recalls. Yet she had hit upon a phenomenon that geneticists had recognized for decades: Older fathers are far more likely than younger men to have children with genetic disorders. According to geneticist James Crow of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, paternal age is the source of genetic diseases caused by new dominant mutations. (Only one copy of a dominant mutant gene is necessary to induce disease.) Among the diseases more likely to occur in children with older fathers are achondroplasia (which causes dwarfism), progeria (premature aging), Marfan’s syndrome (a connective tissue disorder), a predisposition toward a certain type of skin cancer, and some congenital heart defects. All are triggered by simple deletions or substitutions of one DNA base – unlike Down’s syndrome, which is caused by the doubling of an entire chromosome and is usually inherited from the mother.

Why should mutations increase as fathers’ age? The answer lies in the life history of the sperm. By the time a man is 40, each of his sperm cell precursors, called spermatogonia, has divided approximately 660 times, or about 23 times a year after puberty, in order to give rise to sperm. By contrast, in a female, egg precursor cells divide only 24 times, all but one of these divisions occurring before she is born. The more replication, the greater the chance that a copying error – a mutation – will occur. To compound matters, DNA-repair enzymes become less efficient as a man ages and more frequently fail to fix a mutant sperm.

Malaspina’s discovery shed light on a mystery that has long surrounded schizophrenia: How can so disabling a disease, which appears to be at least partly genetic, persist at such high rates when its victims so rarely reproduce? Schizophrenia is common – one in every 100 people suffers from it – and it tends to run in families. Siblings of schizophrenics are 10 times as likely to get the disease, and for identical twins the risk rises to 40 to 60 percent. Yet signs of schizophrenia do not appear until late adolescence and sometimes not until the fourth decade of life (women tend to develop symptoms later than men).

Biologists have long suspected that mutant genes pass the potential for schizophrenia from generation to generation but that they (Question 13) have to be turned on by something in the environment. Head injuries, maternal malnutrition, and rubella during gestation have all been found to increase a person’s risk of contracting the disease. But the leading candidate for an environmental trigger was only recently discovered: a dormant retrovirus incorporated into the human genome millions of years ago. Virologist Robert Yolken of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine found the retrovirus after examining the spinal fluid of 35 schizophrenics. In 29 percent of those who had recently developed symptoms and in 7 percent of chronic cases, the retrovirus was active and generating RNA, the template for proteins. Yolken found no such signs in people free of schizophrenia.

Yolken believes that the retrovirus itself has to be triggered by yet another infection: a herpes virus. But Malaspina thinks the mechanism may be even stranger. Last year researchers at the Genetics Institute Inc. in Massachusetts announced that a gene carried by Yolken’s retrovirus may play an integral role in building the human placenta. The protein for which the gene codes, called syncytin, both prompts placental cells to knit together to nourish (Question17) a fetus and enables the virus to fuse with the cells it (Question 14) infects. The source of schizophrenia, in other words, may lie far back in fetal development, perhaps in faulty neuronal wiring. “It could be that it’s a neurodevelopmental disease,” Malaspina says, “in which a flawed gene derails (Question 18) the normal development of brain neurons.”

The story is far from over. It’s not clear, for instance, how a single mutant gene – even one involved in building the brain – can unleash the elaborate symptoms of schizophrenia. Contrary to popular belief, schizophrenics don’t have “split personalities,” and they’re rarely violent. But they do suffer delusion, disordered thinking, and hearing voices as well as extreme apathy and a profound inability to feel pleasure or motivation.

Malaspina has tremendous hope that her research will lead to greater understanding of a misunderstood disease as well as hope for her own family. Last year her sister – who did eventually graduate from college – got married at the age of 46. Her husband, too, has schizophrenia. As for Dolores Malaspina: “I’m poised (Question 19) to write a book. It will be called Sister, Psychiatrist, Scientist, Friend.”

Discover Vol. 22 No. 10 (October 2001)

http://www.discover.com/oct_01/featbiology.html

Accessed 11 July 2002

COMPREHENSION QUESTIONS

Directions: Choose the best answer to the questions below.

1. The best alternative title for this reading passage is _____.
1. Schizophrenia: A Disease in Our Time
2. Schizophrenia: A Genetic Mystery Solved
3. Schizophrenia: Etiology Remains Unknown
4. Malaspina’s Search

Answer b

2. The thesis of the reading is _____.
1. Delores Malaspina became a doctor because of her sister’s illness.
2. Older fathers risk passing on diseases to their children.
3. Schizophrenia results from a mutant gene passed on by an older father.
4. Mutant genes for schizophrenia are triggered by something in the air.

Answer c

3. Which of the following cause(s) the disease?
1. defective genes
2. viruses
3. environmental factors
4. all of the above

Answer a

4. According to the reading, schizophrenia is _____.
1. fatal
2. controlled by medication
3. a psychological disorder
4. childhood disease

Answer c

5. The age of the father is believed to be unrelated to offspring who have _____.
1. Marfan’s syndrome
2. progeneria
3. Down’s syndrome
4. heart problems

Answer c

6. Which of the following is true?
1. A male’s sperm cell prescursors divide 23 times before puberty.
2. A male’s egg cell prescursors divide 24 times after puberty.
3. A female’s egg cell prescursors divide 23 times after birth.
4. A female’s egg cell prescursors divide 23 times prior to birth.

Answer d

7. Schizophrenics are likely to have _____.
1. delusions
2. violent personalities
3. multiple personalities
4. all of the above

Answer a

8. It is known that schizophrenia is _____.
1. develops due to faulty neuronal wiring
2. likely to occur in families
3. a neurodevelopmental disease
4. all of the above

Answer d

9. Schizophrenics reproduce _____.
1. at a higher rate than non-schizophrenics
2. because the disease is common
3. less frequently than people without schizophrenia
4. until late adolescence and sometimes not until the fourth decade

Answer c

10. One environmental theory maintains that retroviruses are involved in causing schizophrenia because researchers _____.
1. observed retroviral activity in adolescents
2. found DNA in schizophrenics’ spinal fluid
3. observed retroviral activity in older fathers
4. have shown that herpes is common in schizophrenics

Answer c

11. According to the article, symptoms of schizophrenia mostly emerge during _____.
1. childhood
2. adulthood
3. puberty
4. b and c

Answer d

12. It is believed that greater paternal age _____.
1. affects sperm count
2. induces faulty replication of spermatagonia
3. causes chromosomes to double
4. decreases the amount of DNA-repair enzymes

Answer b

13. “They ” refers to _____.
1. generations
2. genes
3. biologists
4. head injuries

Answer b

14. “It ” refers to _____.
1. fetus
2. protein
3. virus
4. placental cells

Answer c

15. “Pouring over ” most likely means _____.
1. mentioning
2. examining
3. borrowing
4. publishing

Answer b

16. “Startling ” most likely means _____.
1. unexpected
2. expected
3. happy
4. premature

Answer a

17. “Nourish ” most likely means _____.
1. feed
2. kill
3. eradicate
4. needs

Answer a

18. “Derails ” most likely means ______.
1. sets off course
2. determines
3. accelerates
4. details

Answer a

19. “Poised ” most likely means _____.
1. reluctant
2. ready
3. afraid
4. happy

Answer b

20. The purpose of this passage is to _____.
1. inform the general public about schizophrenia
2. argue for or against schizophrenia
3. compare/contrast schizophrenia
4. amuse the general public concerning schizophrenia

Answer a