Word: akerfeldt
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Attention centered first on Dr. Stig Akerfeldt, a boyish (27), blond biochemist from Stockholm's famed Nobel Institute, who had reported that when a certain chemical is added to a sample of blood serum, it will turn a bright red if the subject has schizophrenia or other severe mental illness. Akerfeldt's method has been touted as a "test" for schizophrenia. It is far from being that, since it also gives a red reaction with patients suffering from various infections, cancer, disorders of the liver, or even with women in the later months of pregnancy. But Akerfeldt...
Researcher Akerfeldt is clearly over that hurdle: in a jampacked meeting last week U.S. researchers said that they had duplicated his method with minor variations, adding a chemical called DPP (for N,N-dimethyl-p-phenylene diamine) to serum specimens and getting the red reaction from patients with serious mental illnesses and some other diseases. (One notable exception: patients who have had schizophrenia a long time.) Most promising positive use: the reaction seems to be clearest in children, whose emotional disorders are especially hard to diagnose-and who are not likely to have such misleading conditions as malaria or pregnancy...
More important than whether the reaction can be used as a test is the question of why it occurs at all. On this, Biochemist Akerfeldt shed some new light. What Akerfeldt's DPP reacts to is a copper-containing enzyme, ceruloplasmin, present in the blood. It had been assumed that there must be more of this enzyme in schizophrenic than in normal blood. Not so, said Akerfeldt: the reaction measures not the amount but the activity of ceruloplasmin, and this activity depends at least to some extent on the presence of a second substance which he has not identified...
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