Early childhood and adolescent risk factors for psychotic depression in a general population birth cohort sample

Abstract

Background and purpose In the group of severe mental disorders, psychotic depression (PD) is essentially under-researched. Knowledge about the risk factors is scarce and this applies especially to early risk factors. Our aim was to study early childhood and adolescent risk factors of PD in a representative birth cohort sample with a follow-up of up to 50 years. Methods The study was carried out using the Northern Finland Birth Cohort 1966 (NFBC 1966). We used non-psychotic depression (NPD) (n = 746), schizophrenia (SZ) (n = 195), psychotic bipolar disorder (PBD) (n = 27), other psychoses (PNOS) (n = 136) and healthy controls (HC) (n = 8200) as comparison groups for PD (n = 58). We analysed several potential early risk factors from time of birth until the age of 16 years. Results The main finding was that parents' psychiatric illness [HR 3.59 (1.84-7.04)] was a risk factor and a high sports grade in school was a protective factor [HR 0.29 (0.11-0.73)] for PD also after adjusting for covariates in the multivariate Cox regression model. Parental psychotic illness was an especially strong risk factor for PD. The PD subjects had a parent with psychiatric illness significantly more often (p < 0.05) than NPD subjects. Differences between PD and other disorder groups were otherwise small. Conclusions A low sports grade in school may be a risk factor for PD. Psychiatric illnesses, especially psychoses, are common in the parents of PD subjects. A surprisingly low number of statistically significant risk factors may have resulted from the size of the PD sample and the underlying heterogeneity of the etiology of PD.

Looking Through the COVID-19 Window of Opportunity: Future Scenarios Arising From the COVID-19 Pandemic Across Five Case Study Sites

“…Change might be reflected in a newly created dialogue beyond national boundaries with regard to human rights and migration. It will be key to find a sustainable balance between bringing income to the local communities again and protecting fragile ecosystems that just started to recover; this could potentially be accomplished with a future focus on slow tourism and the introduction of more systematic rest periods for fishing ( Conway and Timms, 2010 ; Kroner et al, 2021 ).…”

Clinical characteristics and socio-demographic features of psychotic major depression

“…In general, previous studies failed to nd many demographic differences among patients with PMD versus those with non-psychotic major depression (NMD) [20]. However, there were some exceptions, with the main nding being that a family history [19,21] of psychosis increased the risk for PMD. Other ndings included that patients with PMD were less likely to be Caucasian [4,14] and have lower educational attainment [4,19] compared with those with NMD.…”

“…One study observed more years of education in those with PMD compared with NMD [22]. In terms of early childhood and adolescent risk factors, patients with PMD were signi cantly more likely to report histories of physical or sexual abuse [24] and have lower sports grade in school [21] compared with patients with NMD.…”

Clinical characteristics and sociodemographic features of psychotic major depression

“…In general, previous studies have failed to find many demographic differences between patients with PMD and those without psychotic features [ 18 ]. However, there have been some exceptions; family history [ 19 , 20 ] of psychosis increased the risk for PMD, and ethnicity [ 4 , 14 ] and educational attainment [ 4 , 19 , 21 ] were correlated with psychotic features in depression patients.…”