Acute Stress During Pregnancy Linked to Schizophrenia in Offspring

Women who undergo acute stress during early stages of pregnancy are more likely to deliver children who develop schizophrenia, a psychotic disorder marked by severely impaired thinking, emotions, and behaviors, a study published Thursday suggests.

Schizophrenia is a complex brain disorder that is characterized by bizarre mental experiences such as hallucinations and severe decrements in social, cognitive, and occupational functioning. This chronic mental illness usually strikes in late adolescence or early adulthood, and its Positive symptoms include hallucinations, delusions, thought disorders, and bizarre behaviors.

"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," explained Dr. Dolores Malaspina of the New York University School of Medicine, who led the study.

The study linking prenatal stress with the mental illness looked at birth data for 88,829 people born in Jerusalem, Israel from 1964 to 1976 and cross-referenced the information with Israel's national psychiatry registry.

After analyzing the data, Dr. Malaspina and colleagues found that children of Israeli women who were pregnant during the 1967 Six Day War were at significantly increased risk of being diagnosed with the debilitating mental disease as they entered adulthood.

They also found that children of women who were in their second month of fetal life during the height of the Arab-Israel war in June of 1967 were 4.3 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than females born at other times.

"The raw data suggest a two- to three-fold excess of schizophrenia in the cohort born in January 1968, whose mothers would have been in the second month of pregnancy in June 1967," the authors of the study wrote.

"The population of Jerusalem would have been most stressed during the three days of bombardment on June 5-7."

The study also emphasized a sharp difference in the impact on women and men. The study showed that traumatizing stress affected women more than men. Males in the same pre-natal life were 1.2 times more likely to experience psychotic disorder, the study said.

"It's a very striking confirmation of something that has been suspected for quite some time," said Dr. Malaspina. She further explained that the placentadefine is very sensitive to stress hormonesdefine in the mother and these hormones were elevated during war.

Dr. Malaspina and colleagues reported their findings in the Britain-based open access journal BioMed Central Psychiatry.

Schizophrenia is a biological condition that affects a person’s ability to think clearly, to manage emotions, make decisions, distinguish reality from fantasy and relate to others. This chronic, severe, and disabling brain disorder affects nearly 1.1 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older.