Schizophrenia is of mysterious causation. It is not infectious, not congenital, but shows familial aggregation, the Mendelian genetics indicating involvement of multiple codominant genes with incomplete penetrance. This is the pattern for autoimmune diseases, such as Graves’ disease of the thyroid, where forbidden clones of B lymphocytes develop, and cause thyrotoxicosis by secreting autoantibodies that react with the thyroid gland’s receptor for thyroid-stimulating hormone from the pituitary gland. In 1982, Knight postulated that autoantibodies affecting the function of neurons in the limbic region of the brain are a possible cause of schizophrenia. Today, this is even more probable, with genes predisposing to schizophrenia having being found to be immune response genes, one in the MHC and two for antibody light chain V genes. Immune response genes govern the immune repertoire, dictating the genetic risk of autoimmune diseases. The simplest test for an autoimmune basis of schizophrenia would be trial of immunosuppression with prednisone in acute cases. The urgent research need is to find the microbial trigger, as done by Ebringer for rheumatoid arthritis and for ankylosing spondylitis. This could lead to prophylaxis of schizophrenia by vaccination against the triggering microbe. 1. Introduction Louis Pasteur’s epochal Germ Theory of Disease [1] triggered the fastest advance of medicine ever. The great host of infectious diseases, with their aetiology at last discovered, was soon substantially conquered. Vaccinations provided prophylaxis and antibiotics therapy. Additionally, freed of inevitable wound infection, modern surgery was made possible, led by Lister [2]. In stark contrast to the infectious diseases the autoimmune diseases, have been a cinderella of Medicine. Coombs and Gell’s classification of harmful immune responses [3] was preautoimmunity, antediluvian, based on the misapprehension that Paul Ehrlich’s “horror autotoxicus” dictum was based on proof that autoimmunity never occurs. In reality, Ehrlich [4] wrote that “possible failure of the internal regulation” of immune processes might be “the explanation of many disease phenomena.” The independent demonstration of autoimmunity in four different laboratories [5–9] made Coombs and Gell’s classification obviously wrong, yet it lingered on for decades [10] as an inhibition to clarity of thought. Table 1 shows a valid classification [11] based on awareness of autoimmunity and awareness that allergy is a defect of immune defence against worms and other parasites, being caused by the occurrence of
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