Severe abuse in childhood may treble risk of schizophrenia

[firemonkee]

Children who experience severe forms of abuse are around three times as likely to develop schizophrenia and related psychoses in later life compared with children who do not experience such abuse, according to a study that has brought together psychiatric data from almost 80,000 people.

The results add to a growing body of evidence that childhood maltreatment or abuse can raise the risk of developing mental illnesses in adulthood, including depression, personality disorders and anxiety.

Prof Richard Bentall of the University of Liverpool's Institute of Psychology, Health and Society, who led the study, showed that the risk of developing psychosis increased in line with the amount of abuse or trauma a child had gone through, with the most severely affected children having a 50-fold increased risk compared with children who had suffered no abuse. He also showed that the type of trauma experienced in childhood affected the subsequent psychiatric symptoms later in life.

Schizophrenia occurs in around 1-3% of the population and is defined by psychiatrists as one of the most severe types of mental illness. It is characterised by hearing voices, bizarre beliefs and loss of motivation.

Bentall's team analysed 36 published studies that contained data on childhood maltreatment (including sexual, physical and emotional abuse, death of a parent, school bullying and neglect) and psychiatric symptoms in almost 80,000 people, collected over the course of 30 years. People who experienced these types of trauma in childhood were between 2.7 and 3 times as likely to develop schizophrenia as adults, the team found. The research is published in the journal Schizophrenia Bulletin.

In cases where someone had suffered sustained abuse or several types, their risk of developing schizophrenia in later life was increased further. "People who had severe and multiple traumas in their lives, in some of their studies they'd go up to an odds ratio of 50 times greater risk of psychosis [in later life]," said Bentall. "There is nothing in genetics which looks as strong as this in terms of effects and it's consistent across the different studies, so it's a highly robust effect."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/20...?newsfeed=true

[mckie]

What about those who deveop the condition after a very happy childhood. the usual ages of it showing are said to be 17 - 25. This is a time when they are experiencing all sorts of changes in life style - leaving home to start either study away, or work either near home or away. Smoke. take alcohol, street drugs and too early sexual experience.
Things they can't handle all at once.

[firemonkee]

What about those who deveop the condition after a very happy childhood. the usual ages of it showing are said to be 17 - 25. This is a time when they are experiencing all sorts of changes in life style - leaving home to start either study away, or work either near home or away. Smoke. take alcohol, street drugs and too early sexual experience.
Things they can't handle all at once.

Obviously not all those with sz are going to be abuse victims. What the research suggests is that abuse victims are more likely to develop sz.

[rainack]

may treble risk of schizophrenia.

that's all I need to read to know it's just "theory" a "maybe" a "we don't know really" or just an "idea"/

truth is nobody knows what causes it.

I fucking hate how these twat researchers put in words like "risk" because it just adds to the stigma and fear of the condition.

[OobieMoobie]

This was in the comment section:

As lead author on the research paper discussed in this article, I'd like to respond to this comment.

Its worth noting that this difficulty applies to all psychiatric research. The heritability estimates calculated by geneticists are just fancy correlations, for example, but everyone tends to forget this. Of course, its extremely difficult to prove causality but, in our paper, we judge our findings against the widely accepted criteria proposed by Hill (1965). These are:

(i) Strength of association - we show the association is strong (about as strong as the association between smoking and lung cancer)

(ii) Consistency in the data - we show that different research designs have yielded strikingly similar effects

(iii) Specificity - in a separate paper in the same journal (Bentall, R. P., Wickham, S., Shevlin, M., & Varese, F. Do specific early life adversities lead to specific symptoms of psychosis? A study from the 2007 The Adult Psychiatric Morbidity Survey. Schizophrenia Bulletin, available online) we show that specific types of trauma are associated with specific symptoms of psychosis (sexual abuse is specifically associated with hallucinations, for example)

(iv) Temporal relationship - childhood trauma precedes the onset of psychosis.

(v) Dose-response relationships - we show that the more severe the abuse, the greater the risk of psychosis.

(vi) Plausibility in terms of mechanisms - we have carried out research on plausible mechanisms, published elsewhere (Varese, F., Barkus, E., & Bentall, R. P. (2011). Dissociation mediates the relationship between childhood trauma and hallucination-proneness. Psychological Medicine, 42, 1025-1036.)

(vii) Reversibility - when rates of smoking go down, cases of lung cancer decline also. Sadly, we are in no position to test the reversibility of the effects we have observed.

(viii) Consideration of alternative explanations - we are not aware of any plausible alternative explanations.

The skepticism within psychiatry about the role of early adversity in psychosis is very reminiscent of the skepticism that met Hill when he suggested that smoking leads to cancer (which is why he proposed his criteria). We think we have strong evidence of causality (the dose-response effects are particularly difficult to account for in any other way) but its true we don't have an affidavit from God.

Richard Bentall

No one is claiming that all people with schizophrenia have been abused, or that all people who are abused develop schizophrenia. However research is showing that there is a link.

People who are assaulted during their later life can often go on to develop mental illness. The same can surely be said of a child, particularly as they are at a stage where they are like a little learning sponge.

[rainack]

I have read about such abuse in this way bringing on Bipolar, also if anyone
knew of Pete Shaughnessy who was attacked whilst working on the busses (made a channel 4 documentry in the 90's), the
people around him always noted that it was that attack that brought on his Bipolar.
imo one has to be born with a predisposition to such conditions.
I was attacked in my teens that may of contributed but I was never "normal" from 9yo having delusions.

So I don't think such events are the cause.

[jaxie40]

This is very interesting. My gran was paranoid schizophrenic, but wasn't fully so until she was in her 40's. She was a WREN during WWII, which must have been hard in itself, then she married my grandad and lived with his mother. My gran and her mother-in-law used to have physical fights, basically had an all round abusive relationship. I agree with rainack, my gran was probably predisposed to schizophrenia to begin with.

[OobieMoobie]

imo one has to be born with a predisposition to such conditions.

I have my theories about predisposistion (but obviously they count for nothing since I'm not a researcher psychologist or anything).

I think it's a case that different people will respond in different ways to the same environment. So two young children in an abusive home may both suffer mental health difficulties, but one my go on to develop schizophrenia and the other may develop anorexia. Kind of like, we all have our different "seeds" but for that to develop into a disorder there needs to be environmental factors.

I vaguely remember a case (although it may well have been anecdotal) about twin boys with a violent alcoholic father. One refused to touch alcohol at alll, the other became very much like his Dad. I also remember watching a programme about twins, where one had depression and the other had an eating disorder.

This is all my opinion/observations, but it just kind of feels right to me you know? If only I had a PHD and someone to fund my research.

[keepsafe]

Mmmmm I don;t know, I have been sexually abused and now hear voices, I don;t think I would have heard these evils if something hadn;t happened to me that was so traumatic. I have no proof of anything really.

KS

[mckie]

Not like that Slow fox trot- Quick quick slow