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 Research & Giving News Article  Research recently published in the journal BMC Psychiatry by Dolores Malaspina M.D., a 2007 NARSAD Distinguished Investigator, and colleagues, supports a growing body of literature relating maternal exposure to severe stress during the early months of pregnancy to increased susceptibility in their offspring to schizophrenia. The stresses in question are not restricted to those experienced in a war zone, the researchers make clear. Similar levels of stress might be generated by a natural disaster such as an earthquake or hurricane, a terrorist attack or a sudden bereavement, they note. Data from 88,829 people, born in Jerusalem, Israel, from 1964 to 1976, were collected from the Jerusalem Perinatal Study. Dr. Malaspina, the Anita Steckler and Joseph Steckler Professor of Psychiatry at NYU Langone Medical Center in New York, and a team of associates, 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 (often called “The Six-Day War") displayed a significantly higher incidence of schizophrenia over the following 21 to33 years. The study also showed that the pattern was gender-sensitive, affecting female offspring more often 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. “It's a very striking confirmation of something that has been suspected for quite some time,” Dr. Malaspina said. “The placenta is very sensitive to stress hormones in the mother,” she explained, “and these hormones were probably amplified during the time of the war.” What is the Most Vulnerable Month of Pregnancy? The team acknowledged that their study only supports, rather than proves, the hypothesis that the greatest vulnerability to schizophrenia occurs in the second month of pregnancy. Limitations of the study include a small sample population as well as the absence of information on the exact length of gestation, which makes it possible that developmental stages were underestimated. Dr. Malaspina, who also received a NARSAD Independent Investigator award in 2001, pointed out that pregnant women in general should not be alarmed about handling daily stressors during pregnancy. “A developing fetus actually requires some exposure to maternal stress hormones” to calibrate or condition its response to stress, she says. “But women experiencing anxiety or excessive stress would do well to address it before a planned pregnancy and to have good social support systems.” This article was adapted by NARSAD with permission of NYU Langone Medical Center/New York University School of Medicine |
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