Future of Covid: Will Schizophrenia Haunt the Next Generation?

Whenever I watch horror ghost movies, I always think the characters may have <a href="https://www.nhsinform.scot/illnesses-and-conditions/mental-health/schizophrenia" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">schizophrenia</a>. If Covid-19 had occurred a generation or two earlier, I might have thought that the schizophrenia character‘s mother caught Covid during pregnancy. This idea struck me when a commenter on my <a href="https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/immunity-debt-vs-theft-what-explains-the-post-lockdown-infection-rebounds-2a218283936e?sk=0dac5b838d199b8b524d82f214dd214d" rel="noopener">previous article</a> shared a new study, showing that schizophrenia-specific genes upregulated in pregnant mothers with Covid-19 vs. no Covid. <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-023-38140-1" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">This study</a> isn’t to be taken lightly. It was published in a prestigious journal, Nature Communications, led by world-renowned scientists in the schizophrenia research field. <h1>A backdrop on schizophrenia</h1> A patient affected with schizophrenia can’t differentiate between imagined thoughts from reality. As a result, they may <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3678179/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">believe in</a> supernatural beings like ghosts. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder with symptoms of delusions, hallucinations, and other behavioral anomalies. Schizophrenia typically occurs earlier in men (late adolescence to early twenties) than in women (late twenties). <a href="https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/schizophrenia#" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">About</a> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/epirev/article/30/1/67/621138?login=false" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">0.3–0.7%</a> of the adult population has schizophrenia. Its <a href="https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6745031/" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">risk</a> <a href="https://academic.oup.com/bmb/article/73-74/1/1/332342" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">factors</a> include being male, pregnancy/birth complications, high parental age, early traumatic life events, and social isolation. But none of these factors fully explain or are specific to schizophrenia. Birth complications and early traumatic life events are also risk factors for <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0165178105000508?via%3Dihub=" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">borderline personality</a> or <a href="https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00406-004-0521-2" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">anxiety</a> disorders, for instance <a href="https://medium.com/microbial-instincts/future-of-covid-will-schizophrenia-haunt-the-next-generation-6a5c249c1912">Visit Now</a>