Comic Book Patients: Thom Kallor

Starman/ Star Boy

Condition: Schizophrenia

Thom Kallor as Starman by Alex Ross 

If you read comics or if you ever will, you will start to notice that there are plenty of comic book characters with interesting medical conditions (how half of them got their powers is related to their medical conditions).  

Since I am currently studying brain, mind, and behavior, I thought it would be appropriate to talk about Thom Kallor better known as Star Boy of the Legion of Superheroes and Starman (one of many).  As Starman, Thom has traveled back in time to the 21st century with a secret mission.  Due to the primitive medicine of our time, Thom's condition becomes symptomatic and he is revealed to have schizophrenia.  Apparently, there's no better way to hide a secret mission in a world full of telepaths than to assign it to a schizophrenic man (what a plot device!).

Starman seems to exhibit the cognitive and disorganized symptoms of schizophrenia.  These include incoherence, looseness of association, and impaired attention.  Arguably, these symptoms are some of the more entertaining ones that have been seen.  Schizophrenics can also exhibit hallucinations and delusions (positive symptoms which can also be entertaining but also scary at times) or be more passive as if they were not really in their own heads (negative symptoms).  

It is true that schizophrenics do not always respond to modern medications and typically these medications are best at  reducing the positive symptoms (Geoff Johns did his homework).  Today, guidelines recommend managing schizophrenia with a class of drugs called atypical antipsychotics which include clozapine, risperidone, and olanzapine.  The exact mechanism of these drugs is not quite clear but all target dopamine pathways, probably antagonizing dopamine receptors.

The success of antipsychotics has supported the dopamine hypothesis to explain schizophrenia.  Dopamine is a neurotransmitter found in many areas of the brain.  It is believed that the excessive release of dopamine in the mesolimbic pathway leads to the positive symptoms of psychosis.  This is further supported by the fact that cocaine and amphetamines, drugs that cause higher levels of dopamine to be present in neural synapses, can induce psychosis.  

Glutamate is another neurotransmitter of interest in schizophrenia.  The glutamate hypothesis of schizophrenia proposes that lower levels of glutamate binding to NMDA receptors in the brain can explain both positive and negative symptoms of schizophrenia.  Drugs that antagonize NMDA receptors such as PCP and ketamine have been shown to induce psychosis.

Finally, on an interesting note to all you legalizers out there, use of cannibis (i.e. marijuana) has been linked to risk of earlier onset of schizophrenia.  Of course these links are somewhat controversial (if you think there are no scientists that smoke weed out there then you must live in Disney World) but at least one study shows that people with a certain polymorphism in an enzyme known as catechol-O-methyltransferase (COMT) are more susceptible to psychosis with use of cannabis in early adolescence.

Thom Kallor in Justice Society of America #12; pencils by Dale Eaglesham, inks by Ruy Jose, and colors by Alex Sinclair