Schizophrenia and rheumatoid arthritis are inversely correlated, having one makes you less likely to have the other, and researching why could lead to therapies for both.
Are there other conditions like that where having medical condition A makes you less likely to have condition B?
Sickle cell anemia is inversely related to HIV and malaria infections.
One of the classic inverse relationships is sickle cell anemia and malaria.
Research suggests an inverse relationship between some cancers and neurolgical diseases.
Growth hormone receptor deficiencies such as those found in Laron syndrome have an inverse relationship with cancer and diabetes:
Alzheimer’s Disease and cancer:
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/760142
Schizophrenia and Type 1 diabetes:
Cowpox and smallpox, ya? The relationship between which inspired vaccination (the word at least).
(This is where I refuse to jest about cows, small things, and autism.)
Oh what the hell: Childhood leukemia and Alzheimer’s. I’d be willing to bet.
Any serious childhood illness is going to be inversely correlated to cancer, because cancer is mostly a disease of old age. If you die of diphtheria at age 7, you won’t get cancer at age 70.
Regards,
Shodan
Yes and amputation of the foot is going to be inversely correlated with broken bones in the foot, but when we measure disease incidence, we measure it as a fraction of the existing sample size not a theoretical sample size.
Threads like this are why I love the dope!
Well in an academic way it would be , but in practice its not inversely correlated since the cancer could not be detected in the children with serious childhood diseases. The correlation can only appear when the cancer appears…
You have to be careful when concluding that one disease ‘protects’ against another. Yes, there are clear inverse associations such as sickle cell and malaria. But, it pays to remember that before a disease can be correlated with another, it must first be recognized and then diagnosed. As it turns out, when physicians treat a patient with disease X they seem to disregard the possibility that the patient may also have disease Y.
Here is a reference that demonstrates physicians’ tendency to ignore second diseases in patients who have already been diagnosed with another.
This phenomenon may be attributable, at least in part, to physicians’ heavy reliance on Occam’s Razor - essentially that the preferred explanation is the simplest (or, phrased in medical terms: it’s best to try to explain a patient’s symptoms by invoking one disease and not several).
Finally! An upside to my cancer!
Note that it’s not sickle cell, the disease, that inversely correlates with malaria, it’s having the sickle cell genetic trait. Sickle cell disease, itself, makes one more vulnerable to malaria.
Hemochromatosis VS the (black/bubonic) plague.
http://membercentral.aaas.org/blogs/scientia/hemochromatosis-and-bubonic-plague
A family friend related that his doctor told him that being allergic to wheat also means your body can’t make the bad kind of cholesterol. “No more toast with breakfast, but all the bacon I want” he said.
There are components of “satisfaction of search”, (over?)use of Occam’s Razor, and simply very focused problem oriented treatment.
Problem oriented treatment sometimes gets a bad rap, but it’s not always a good thing to look under every rock to see what crawls out.
Plus the OP noted that rheumatoid arthritis and schizophrenia are negatively correlated. Both RA and type 1 diabetes are autoimmune disorders. I wonder if there is some broader generalization that autoimmune disorders are negatively correlated with schizophrenia. And if so, I’d wonder why.
By the same token, having testicular cancer makes it very unlikely that you will subsequently develop ovarian cancer and vice-versa.
I wonder if sex ratios are taken into account? Females are more likely to get rheumatoid arthritis (and many other autoimmune disorders). Males are more likely to get schizophrenia. This could cause an apparent inverse correlation.
Type I diabetes and schizophrenia inverse correlation would not be due simply to sex ratios.
Type I diabetes has nearly equal M:F ratio in childhood, and more males in young adult.