Exposure to Mother ’s Heightened Immune Response in Womb May Increase Schizophrenia Risk

Exposure to a mother ’s heightened immune response early in pregnancy may increase an individual’s risk of developing schizophrenia, suggests astudy inLancet Psychiatry.“We found that higher concentrations of proinflammatory cytokines [TNFα, IL-1β, and IL-6] in specifically the first half of pregnancy were associated with a risk for psychosis among offspring, implicating an earlier timepoint in gestation than previously understood,” wrote Dana Allswede, M.S., and Tyrone Cannon, Ph.D., of Yale University and colleagues. “These three cytokines are potent proinflammatory proteins that have a critical role in the initial response to infection and in initiating and sustaining inflammatory responses.”The findings were based on data collected for the National Collaborative Perinatal Project (NCPP) —a large-scale prospective longitudinal study. As part of this study, pregnant women from across the United States provided blood samples at prenatal visits and birth from 1958 to 1965.Allswede, Cannon, and colleagues focused on the women and offspring in the Philadelphia cohort of NCPP, which included 9,236 surviving offspring of 6,753 pregnant women. The researchers examined medical records to determine whether the offspring developed psychotic disorders by adulthood. They also analyzed the concentrations of the following cytokines in the maternal blood samples: TNF α, IL-1β, IL-5, IL-6, IL-8, IL-10, and IL-17a.The final sample included 90 offspring who later developed ...
Source: Psychiatr News - Category: Psychiatry Tags: Bruno Agustini Dana Allswede IL-1 β IL-6 inflammatory response Lancet Psychiatry Michael Berk pregnancy proinflammatory cytokines schizophrenia TNF α Tyrone Cannon Source Type: research