Scientists attending a New Orleans symposium on schizophrenia today heard papers on the action of a blood substance believed at the root of the mental disease.
Dr. Robert G. Heath, professor and chairman of the* department of psychiatry and neurology at Tulane medical school, was to open the session with a discussion of "The Mode of Action of Taraxein."
Taraxein is a substance found in the blood of schizophrenics which Dr. Heath and others have found will induce psychotic symptoms in normal individuals when injected into their blood streams. Symposium Sponsors
The symposium, drawing scientists from Sweden and several U.S. research centers, is being sponsored by the Louisiana state hospitals department and Tulane and Louisiana State university medical schools at the Fontaine-bleau Motor hotel.
Scientists yesterday told of experiments in which blood plasma components from schizoid persons as well as normal plasma retarded the learning ability and memory retention of laboratory animals.
j Dr. Heath and his Tulane co-workers believe they have isolated a small molecule in a blood protein which is the agent responsible for disturbing thought processes of schizophrenia victims. Highly Unstable
.The substance under study, taraxein, is highly unstable, and several other research groups have had difficulty duplicating the Tulanians' results.
Dr. Robert Pennell, of the Protein Foundation, Jamaica Plain,! Mass., told the symposium blood plasma from normal individuals has interferred with the ability of rats to remember a learned routine.
But he said the rats do a poorer job when plasma from schizophrenics is injected. Toxic Substance
Scientists attending the symposium, the first of its kind, are 'agreed that some toxic substance in the blood of schizophrenic persons figures large in their ailment.
They hope for a breakthrough in which a cure can be found for the disease filling hospital psychiatric wards.
A spokesman for the Swedes, Dr. Gosta Ehrensvard, head of Lund university's institute of biochemistry, said he and fellow Swedish scientists are just getting a good start on studies which appear to corroborate findings at Tulane.
