Acute Maternal Stress During Pregnancy Linked To Development Of Schizophrenia

Pregnant women who endure the psychological stress of being in a war zone are more likely to give birth to a child who develops schizophrenia.

Research published in the open access journal BMC Psychiatry supports a growing body of literature that attributes maternal exposure to severe stress during the early months of pregnancy to an increased susceptibility to schizophrenia in the offspring.

According to lead author Dolores Malaspina M.D., M.Sc.P.H., Anita Steckler and Joseph Steckler Professor of Psychiatry at the NYU School of Medicine, “The stresses in question are those that would be experienced in a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane, a terrorist attack, or a sudden bereavement”.

Data from 88,829 people, born in Jerusalem from 1964 to 1976, were collected from the Jerusalem Perinatal Study that linked birth records to Israel’s Psychiatric Registry.

The NYU authors discovered that the offspring of women who were in their second month of pregnancy during the height of the Arab-Israeli war in June of 1967 displayed a significantly higher incidence of schizophrenia over the following 21-33 years.

The study also showed that the pattern was gender-specific, affecting females more than males.

Following the 1967 war, females who had been in their second month of fetal life during the conflict were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than females born at other times. Males in their second month of fetal life were 1.2 times more likely to develop schizophrenia.

Read more at EurekAlert