Reports new study in Biological Psychiatry
A study published in Biological Psychiatry reveals a new link between low levels of the thyroid hormone thyroxine during pregnancy and risk of schizophrenia in the offspring.
Low levels of free thyroxine in pregnant women, referred to as hypothyroxinemia, are associated with abnormalities in cognitive development similar to those in schizophrenia, a neurodevelopmental disorder. Hypothyroxinemia is also associated with preterm birth, a risk factor for schizophrenia.
To determine if hypothyroxinemia is associated with schizophrenia, the study, led by senior author Dr. Alan Brown, Professor of Psychiatry Epidemiology at Columbia University Medical Center, the New York State Psychiatric Institute, and Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, examined thyroxine levels in archived serum samples from 1010 mothers of children with schizophrenia and 1010 matched control mothers. The sera were collected during the first and early second trimesters of pregnancy as part of the Finnish Maternity Cohort. Comprehensive Finnish registries of the population and psychiatric diagnoses provided information on case status (schizophrenia or control) among offspring of mothers corresponding to the prenatal serum samples.
The authors found that 11.8% of people with schizophrenia had a mother with hypothyroxinemia, compared with 8.6% of people without schizophrenia. The finding was statistically significant. This suggests that children of mothers with hypothyroxinemia during pregnancy have increased odds of developing schizophrenia. The association remained even after adjusting for variables strongly related to schizophrenia such as maternal psychiatric history and smoking.
First author of the study Dr. David Gyllenberg of the University of Turku, Finland, thinks the importance of this paper is that it “links the finding to an extensive literature on maternal hypothyroxinemia during gestation altering offspring brain development.” Dr. Gyllenberg was a visiting scholar at Columbia University when much of the research was conducted.
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