1. he does a history of violence and was actually the first person in north miami beach to be tased by the police. when he was about 17 or 18 he had a fight with his mother and she called 911 saying he was going to kill her. The police officer actually remembers the case and said his eyes looked empty and he could not understand or hear commands made by officers for him to calm down, and they had to tase him several times to get him under control. This is what made me think he had a psychotic break maybe caused by underlying schizophrenia emerging. his age puts him in the range most men develop the illness and the tendencies were there if you believe the officers story.
2. he had a bunch of pills in his stomach and i don’t know why but they have not been able to identify them, so who knows why they were and what they activated. It was also 95 degrees that day and he walked over 5 miles in the heat.
3. he told his best friend he had some important news but he was afraid no one would understand and his family were deeply religious hatian immigrants who apparently bombarded him with threats of the devil and things of that nature, which to a person in the beginning of schizophrenia, would be very stressful.
thats all, just wanted to share

AND… he didn’t actually ‘kill’ anybody… he was biting the dude, but not actually eating the flesh.

Therefore he was not a killer nor a cannibal… he was just hot and hungry!!!

Just kidding… enjoyed the explanations Dr. Novella.

I wonder if they saved Eugene’s brain for pathological study. Should follow up on it. I think that he was in a socioeconomic group where psychiatric disorders may go undiagnosed & untreated for a long, long time. People in his situation usually end up as a “crazy homeless guy.” It is possible that he had something like a psychotic schizophrenic event; and completely lost touch with reality.

Also, I don’t think we should refer to him as a cannibal anymore. He didn’t swallow the tissue, and it doesn’t seem as though he was planning or choosing to eat human flesh. The crazy college student in Baltimore is another story, though. I would call him a cannibal because he saved specific parts for consumption.

Also, regarding the clothing thing. We don’t know whether his body temperature was actually elevated or not. During psychotic events, people take their clothes off. Some people have heightened sense of touch or itch or pain and that coupled with a loss of inhibition will cause them to take their clothes off. Probably the disinhibition is enough (I’ve known toddlers who make a habit of getting naked for no apparent reason). If his body temperature were actually elevated, I highly doubt that his brain was actually physically “hot.” I believe that the hypothalamus controls body temperature — if it was somehow not functioning properly and its sensors indicated that his body temperature was colder than it actually was, it would cause his core body temperature to rise; whatever the heightened emotional state and hormones or neuropeptides were signaling to his hypothalamus was out of control and caused his metabolism to go out of whack to the point that his temperature elevated (or he stopped sweating or something). Maybe this is your UCP response, Daed, but I think it’s a step or 3 in the process, not the cause of his breakdown.

There are 3-carbon intermediates in the Krebs cycle that can’t come from lipids and as they need to be replaced, amino acids need to be broken down to supply them.

A lot of immune cells need to use glycolysis because they need to operate in hypoxic regions of necrotic tissues.

That’s why during starvation muscle tends to be destroyed. The brain can’t function on ketone bodies, so the body digests muscle proteins to create glucose, at the expense of the actual muscle.

Excepting this case of a live victim, what is the intrinsic difference between cannibalism and transplantation?

High rate production of ATP requires a high mitochondria potential which increases superoxide production. Disinhibiting cytochrome c oxidase allows O2 to be consumed to a low partial pressure which provides the driving force for the passive diffusion of O2 to mitochondria.

The low NO also regulates ATP levels to be low via their combined effects on sGC. The reduced ATP concentration turns off non-essential ATP consuming pathways to free up more ATP production capacity for running from the bear.

That low NO also has neuropsychiatric effects. It is part of what causes roid rage, and many of the rage-inducing effects of stimulants. There was work done with decorticated cats. If you remove certain brain centers, cats are ok, until they are triggered to be in a fight-or-flight state. That state has hysteresis and with those centers gone, they can’t get out of it and so they are in a rage until they die from exhaustion, usually in a few hours. Fight-or-flight is a global response, you need a global control system to turn it on, and a global control signal to turn it off.