A short period of sexual contact with parents before pregnancy increases the risk of schizophrenia in offspring



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Children may be slightly more at risk for schizophrenia when their parents had sex contacts less than three years before conceiving, according to a study conducted at the Icahn School of Medicine in Mount Sinai and published on April 23 in the newspaper Research on schizophrenia.

Schizophrenia is a chronic and severe mental disorder that affects the way a person thinks, feels and behaves. People with schizophrenia may seem to have lost touch with reality and suffer from hallucinations, delusions, a thought disorder, a negative mood, and cognitive impairment. Research has shown that many different genes can increase the risk of schizophrenia and that interactions between genes and aspects of the individual's environment, including exposure to viruses, malnutrition before birth, birth problems and / or psychosocial factors are necessary for schizophrenia to develop.

Previous research has shown that preeclampsia, the most common pregnancy complication involving inflammation of the placenta, is associated with abnormalities in offspring development that predispose them to a risk of schizophrenia two to four times higher. Research has also shown that a long period of vaginal exposure to the father's sperm of offspring before pregnancy can overcome maternal intolerance to paternal antigens, risk factor for preeclampsia.

"We hypothesized that if maternal intolerance of father's sperm was a risk factor for schizophrenia, the duration of sexual contact before pregnancy of couples could then be related to the risk of schizophrenia in offspring "said Dolores Malaspina, MD, MS, MS, MPH, Professor of Psychiatry, Genetics and Genomics as well as Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai and first author of the article. "Our results conclude that offspring born to married couples under the age of three, regardless of paternal age, present a slightly increased risk of schizophrenia, which is independent of parental psychiatric disorders and paternal age. We anticipate that this work will inspire many more studies to examine this pathway of the disease.

An earlier study by Dr. Malaspina demonstrated an association between short marriage durations and an increased risk of schizophrenia in children of all births, with preeclampsia being considered as an explanation. This study did not take into account parental psychiatric illness or the age of the father at marriage, two factors that may be relevant to hereditary vulnerability to the disease.

In this new study, the researchers analyzed the risk of schizophrenia in children and dissociated the interdependent measures of father's age, father's age at marriage, psychiatric diagnoses of parents and the age of the father. duration of the marriage. In particular, the research team analyzed more than 90,000 children in the prospective Jerusalem-based schizophrenia schizophrenia-based schizophrenia schizophrenia study (JPSS), a birth cohort study that recorded all births in an area. Jerusalem from 1964 to 1976. Children born to parents who were married for less than two years, which equates to about one year of premarital sex, had an increased risk of schizophrenia of 50%, and an increased risk of 30%. % for marriages of two to four years. On the other hand, a longer marriage duration against risk had protective effects: each year, a 14% reduction in the risk of schizophrenia was predicted.

Although the duration of marriage is not a sufficient approximation of the total length of sexual cohabitation of a couple in almost all developed countries, 97% of the JPSS group of 1964-1976 children were born to married couples. So, as now, Israel had some of the lowest births in all countries, and the duration of the marriage at the time of birth of each research subject is therefore reasonably considered to be the lower limit of the length of time the mother spends. vaginally. exposed to the sperm of the father of the offspring.

"Our results, which coincide with the obstetrical literature that shows a shorter duration of parental sexual contact before conception increases the risk of pregnancy for preeclampsia, are timely in light of the recent discovery that some genes involved in schizophrenia are Placenta genes with differential expression of prenatal adversity like preeclampsia and hypertension, "says Dr. Malaspina. "The data suggest that prenatal immune activation of preeclampsia could produce lasting inflammatory vulnerability for the mother and fetus, increasing susceptibility to psychiatric and metabolic conditions."

Dr. Malaspina's research team is currently examining the duration of marriage as a risk factor for other psychiatric disorders and for metabolic disorders.


Advanced paternal age increases the risk of early schizophrenia in offspring


More information:
Dolores Malaspina et al, The short duration of marriage at conception as a risk factor independent of schizophrenia, Research on schizophrenia (2019). DOI: 10.1016 / j.schres.2019.03.001

Provided by
The Mount Sinai Hospital


Quote:
A short period of sexual contact with parents before pregnancy increases the risk of schizophrenia in children (April 23, 2019)
recovered on April 24, 2019
from https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-04-short-period-parental-sexual-contact.html

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