Abstract
BackgroundStudies of children born to parents with schizophrenia and affective disorders can allow us to study the processes preceding the manifestation of the disease, and thereby provide a possibility for identifying early amendable risk factors such as poor parenting, deviances in cognitive functioning, and early, subtle signs of psychopathology at a point where preventive intervention can be applied.MethodsThe Danish High Risk and Resilience Study - VIA7 is a representative nationwide cohort study of 522 7-year-old children of parents with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder or neither of these disorders recruited during 2013–2015. The sample consists of: 202 children with a parent diagnosed with schizophrenia spectrum psychosis, 120 children with a parent diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and 200 children with neither of the parents treated in mental health services for the above diagnoses.We have collected blood and saliva samples from the children and their parents and polygenic risk scores were calculated. We have thoroughly assessed the home environment with the instrument HOME. We have assessed main outcomes such as psychopathology, PLIKS, neurocognition and social cognition.We will analyse the influence of genetic and environmental exposures and their interaction.ResultsGenerally, the children with a familial risk of schizophrenia had lower neurocognitive, social cognitive and neuromotor functioning, more child psychiatric diagnoses, and more severe symptoms compared to control children. In most comparisons, children of parents with bipolar disorder were not different from controls, but in some tests they performed poorer or had more symptoms compared to than control children.We will present data on genetic and environmental risk factors for these outcomesDiscussionThis is the largest high-risk study ever conducted. It is unique that we have access to detailed phenotyping and extensive information on environmental and genetic risk factors. Studies like this can inform about patogenesis and possibilities for future preventive interventions
Highlights
Experiencing multiple types of victimization during adolescence is associated with onset of psychotic experiences
Using detailed data on lifetime pattern of cannabis use from the EUGEI first episode case-control study (N=2300) and the available Incidence rates of Psychosis calculated for each European site of the same study, we aim 1) to estimate if differences in age at first use, especially of high potency cannabis among cannabis users resulted in differences in their probability to develop psychosis across the study sites; 2) to calculate the proportion of new cases of psychosis attributable to early adolescence-high Potency cannabis in the 5 countries; 3) to relate data on prevalence of cannabis use in each study site with the corresponding Incidence rates for psychotic disorders
The correlation between lifetime use of cannabis in population controls from the study sites was significantly correlated with the corresponding incidence rates for Psychosis (r=0.6; p
Summary
Children and adolescents with deprived backgrounds have high rates of psychiatric problems. We analysed the association by survival analysis using Poisson regression and incidence rate ratios (IRRs), adjusted for year and offspring characteristics, and adjusted for parental factors (age at offspring’s birth and parental psychiatric disorders). Discussion: Parental homelessness was strongly associated with an increased risk of psychosis and several other severe psychiatric disorders in offspring during childhood and adolescence. These findings have important implications for public health and policy because they suggest a need for improvement in the support of socially marginalised families to help prevent psychiatric illness in offspring. Our findings suggested that the risk of any psychiatric disorder in offspring associated with parental homelessness depended on the parental psychiatric diagnoses
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