ArticleFrontiers in psychology2012
Cognitive and neuroplasticity mechanisms by which congenital or early blindness may confer a protective effect against schizophrenia.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2012. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 26 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
26 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 52 citations in OpenAlex.
- Associations between psychosis and visual acuity impairment: A systematic review and meta-analysis.Acta psychiatrica Scandinavica · 2021Pooled it
- Retinal Origins of Aberrant Salience in Schizophrenia: The Perceptual Theory.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Review
- Investigating the association between schizophrenia and distance visual acuity: Mendelian randomisation study.BJPsych open · 2023Article
- Evidence From Imaging Resilience Genetics for a Protective Mechanism Against Schizophrenia in the Ventral Visual Pathway.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2022Article
- Association Between Childhood Visual Acuity and Late Adolescent Psychotic Experiences: A Prospective Birth Cohort Study.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2022Article
- Eyes, the window on psychosis?BJPsych open · 2022Article
- Cortical connectivity in the face of congenital structural changes-A case of homozygous LAMC3 mutation.Brain and behavior · 2021Article
- Patients with first-episode untreated schizophrenia who experience concomitant visual disturbances and auditory hallucinations exhibit co-impairment of the brain and retinas-a pilot study.Brain imaging and behavior · 2021Article
- Oculomics in Schizophrenia Research.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2021Article
- Phenotypic Trade-Offs: Deciphering the Impact of Neurodiversity on Drug Development in Fragile X Syndrome.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- Brain Entropy During Aging Through a Free Energy Principle Approach.Frontiers in human neuroscience · 2021Article
- Blindness, Psychosis, and the Visual Construction of the World.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2020Article
- Development and Evaluation of a Visual Remediation Intervention for People with Schizophrenia.Journal of psychiatry and brain science · 2020Article
- Seasonality of births in horizontal strabismus: comparison with birth seasonality in schizophrenia and other disease conditions.Journal of developmental origins of health and disease · 2019Article
- Visual Acuity in Late Adolescence and Future Psychosis Risk in a Cohort of 1 Million Men.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2019Article
- Comparative psychopharmacology of autism and psychotic-affective disorders suggests new targets for treatment.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2019Review
- Autism and psychosis as diametrical disorders of embodiment.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2019Article
- Visual and non-visual motion information processing during pursuit eye tracking in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2017Article
- Article
- Diametrical diseases reflect evolutionary-genetic tradeoffs: Evidence from psychiatry, neurology, rheumatology, oncology and immunology.Evolution, medicine, and public health · 2015Review
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors at 1 institution in 1 country.
Funding
Abstract
Several authors have noted that there are no reported cases of people with schizophrenia who were born blind or who developed blindness shortly after birth, suggesting that congenital or early (C/E) blindness may serve as a protective factor against schizophrenia. By what mechanisms might this effect operate? Here, we hypothesize that C/E blindness offers protection by strengthening cognitive functions whose impairment characterizes schizophrenia, and by constraining cognitive processes that exhibit excessive flexibility in schizophrenia. After briefly summarizing evidence that schizophrenia is fundamentally a cognitive disorder, we review areas of perceptual and cognitive function that are both impaired in the illness and augmented in C/E blindness, as compared to healthy sighted individuals. We next discuss: (1) the role of neuroplasticity in driving these cognitive changes in C/E blindness; (2) evidence that C/E blindness does not confer protective effects against other mental disorders; and (3) evidence that other forms of C/E sensory loss (e.g., deafness) do not reduce the risk of schizophrenia. We conclude by discussing implications of these data for designing cognitive training interventions to reduce schizophrenia-related cognitive impairment, and perhaps to reduce the likelihood of the development of the disorder itself.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.