Our findings in the Helsinki Influenza Study and the Danish Forty Year Study lead us to conclude that a 2nd-trimester maternal influenza infection may increase risk for adult schizophrenia or adult major affective disorder. More recently we have also reported an increase of unipolar depression among offspring who were exposed prenatally to a severe earthquake (7.8 on the Richter scale) in Tangshan, China. Among the earthquake-exposed males (but not the females), we observed a significantly greater depression response for those individuals exposed during the 2nd trimester of gestation. These findings suggest that maternal influenza infection and severe maternal stress may operate (in different ways) as teratogens, disrupting the development of the fetal brain and increasing risk for developing schizophrenia or depression in adulthood.

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These largely negative findings are discussed in the light of strong predictive relationships existing between genetic risk, diagnosis and functional outcomes. The pattern of predictive relationships suggests that overall cognitive functioning may play less of a role in schizophrenia-spectrum pathology than is widely believed, at least among populations with an evident family history of schizophrenia.

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