A previous study found that children conceived during a food shortage in the Netherlands in 1944 and 1945 were twice as likely to develop the devastating mental illness, which is marked by hallucinations and delusions.
In the new study, David St. Clair of Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China and colleagues examined the records of people whose mothers lived through a famine in China from 1959 to 1961. The researchers focused on the Wuhu region of Anhui, one of the hardest-hit provinces, comparing schizophrenia rates among those born before, during and after the famine years by analyzing all psychiatric records from 1971 through 2001.
The risk of developing schizophrenia in later life increased from 0.84 percent in 1959 to 2.15 percent in 1960 and to 1.81 percent in 1961, the researchers reported in the Wednesday issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. The risk was 2.3 times higher for those born in 1960 and 1.9 times higher for those born in 1961.
"Our findings are internally consistent and almost exactly replicate the Dutch findings," the researchers wrote. "Since the two populations are ethnically and culturally distinct, the processes involved may apply in all populations undergoing famine."
In an editorial accompanying the study, Richard Neugebauer of Columbia University in New York said researchers now need to determine whether a specific part of the diet is crucial.
"The most pressing question from a public health . . . perspective is whether the relevant nutritional restriction of interest constitutes a global nutritional deficiency or a specific micronutrient deficiency," Neugebauer wrote.
"If the former, the implications of this work are confined largely to developing countries where severe protein-calorie malnutrition is common. . . . If the latter, the implications extend to developed and developing countries alike."
-- Rob Stein
Study Delves Into Sleep Apnea
New research suggests that people who die in their sleep may have stopped breathing because of a long-term degeneration of certain cells in the brain.
Jack Feldman, a professor of neurobiology at the School of Medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles, said his team's findings could reveal the mechanism behind what is called "central" sleep apnea, usually diagnosed in people older than 65.
