Children born to parents with either schizophrenia or bipolar disorder are at high risk for a range of psychopathologies even at a young age, and even mild psychopathology in these children may a harbinger of future illness, a longitudinal study indicates.
The study was presented here during the 28th European College of Neuropsychopharmacology (ECNP) Congress.
“It’s important to follow offspring of parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder because in the general population, both schizophrenia and bipolar disorder have a low prevalence of only about 1% to 2%, whereas in offspring, this prevalence increases tenfold, so it’s 10% to 20% in offspring from parents with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,” Manon Hillegers, MD, PhD, University Medical Center Utrecht Brain Center
“We found that schizophrenia offspring had a very high lifetime prevalence of psychopathology in general, at around 70%, whereas the lifetime prevalence in bipolar disorder offspring was about 50% and between 15% and 18% in the general population,”
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