Hypothesis on illnesses depending on state transition in cooperative systems: relevance to cancer and schizophrenia

1. There are some remarkable analogies between neoplastic growth of tissue cells and other pathological events such as functional alterations of the central nervous system resulting in schizophrenic behaviour. 2. Body tissues in general and the central nervous system in particular are highly cooperative systems which can undergo state transitions at critical points. 3. Circadian rhythms may be regarded as giant fluctuations near a critical point. 4. Temperature shifts and changes of other environmental conditions can induce reversible state transitions whose occurrence is indeterminate but whose progress, once they have occurred, is inevitable. 5. Hypothermia may be a useful form of treatment of illnesses such as cancer, that can be reversed, since it is a mean of bringing a system back to its equilibrium. 6. If we assume that characters such as vitamin dependency are gentically transmitted we may envisage that homozygotes for that character have a phenotypic expression which may lead to high probabilities of developing schizophrenia and cancer at two different ages as a result of environment-dependent phase transitions.