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Findings of Pivotal Study of Malnutrition’s Link to Schizophrenia Risk is Replicated by Chinese Researchers

WHO:
Richard Neugebauer, PhD, MPH
Author of JAMA Editorial, “Accumulating Evidence of Prenatal Nutritional Origins of Mental Disorders:” August 3 issue
WHERE:
NYS Psychiatric Institute
Epidemiology of Developmental Brain Disorders Department
1051 Riverside Drive @ W. 165th St.

Researchers in the NYS Psychiatric Institute’s Epidemiology of Developmental Brain Disorders Department were the first to demonstrate a link between severe maternal nutritional deficiency and risk for schizophrenia in offspring. The Dutch Hunger Winter of 1944-45 served as the basis of that original study and gave rise to a host of subsequent studies investigating the intrauterine environment’s role in fetal brain development as reflected in subsequent risk for psychiatric disorders in offspring.

The results of the Chinese famine study, reported in the August 3 issue of JAMA and the subject of Dr. Richard Neugebauer’s editorial, offer strong support for the findings of the original Dutch study. Based on markedly different historical circumstance, different research methods and cultural context, the Chinese study puts to rest a number of doubts regarding the original Dutch findings. For example, one theory posited that the population susceptible to schizophrenia was over-represented among those having children during the famine. Not so, says Dr. Neugebauer: “Among the cases with schizophrenia, the authors found that the proportion having relatives with mental disorder was the same for those born before, during, or after the famine years. This result reduces the plausibility of selective procreation as a credible explanation for the Dutch or for the Chinese findings.”

Dr. Neugebauer, in addition to being one of the authors of the Dutch Famine study, pioneered work on the association between famine and personality disorders, as reported in his 1999 JAMA article “Prenatal Exposure to Wartime Famine and Development of Antisocial Personality Disorder in Early Adulthood.” He is a research scientist in the Epidemiology of Developmental Brain Disorders Department.

Dr Neugebauer’s editorial celebrates the way in which epidemiologists and other medical researchers are able to extract “otherwise inaccessible scientific knowledge from the harsh soil of human catastrophe”.

8/1/05

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