Your Chances of Developing Schizophrenia Depend on How Much Sunshine Your Mother Received

July 23, 2006

http://web.archive.org/web/20040409192133/www.mercola.com/2002/feb/27/schizophrenia.htm

Evidence is accumulating to support the theory that vitamin D deficiency during pregnancy, caused by a lack of sunlight, can alter the development of a child's brain in the womb. The data for a link with schizophrenia is still controversial, but potentially worrying because vitamin D deficiency is so common.

Vitamin D's role in building healthy brains had been largely ignored, until researchers began to spot some curious epidemiological trends.

People who develop schizophrenia in Europe and North America are more likely to be born in the spring. And they are roughly four times as likely to be born to Afro-Caribbean immigrants living in England as they are to have parents of other ethnic origins living in the same areas.

The body needs sunlight to make vitamin D, and people with darker skin need more than paler-skinned people. So such observations led investigators to propose that a lack of vitamin D during early development tips the balance towards schizophrenia in genetically susceptible people.

Loud Noise

Investigators have completed studies on rats that add experimental meat to the epidemiological bones. They have found that - just like humans with schizophrenia - adult rats deprived of vitamin D from conception are more startled than normal by a loud noise preceded by a soft noise.

Ventricles in the brains of vitamin-deprived baby rats are also unusually large, a feature seen in people with schizophrenia.

The researchers also used "gene chips" to look at the activity of thousands of genes in the brains of adult rats deprived of vitamin D during gestation. The chips revealed many genes had become less active, including three for brain receptors, and several that code for proteins involved in building nerve synapses.

Wake-Up Call

The rat studies clearly show that too little vitamin D does something nasty to the brain. We urgently need to find out exactly what that is, because vitamin D deficiency affects 12 per cent of women of childbearing age, according to a large US survey.

This should be a big wake-up call. We should find out quickly because low vitamin D could impact general intelligence, and have a whole range of neurological outcomes.

International Society for Developmental Neuroscience meeting in Sydney, Australia February 2002