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Childhood Central Nervous System Viral Infections and Adult Schizophrenia

Having a viral infection of the central nervous system as a child does not increase the risk of going on to develop schizophrenia, a Finnish study has concluded.

The study was seeking to replicate the results of the North Finland 1966 birth cohort study (see related link below), which found that childhood CNS infections were associated with a 5-fold increased risk of developing schizophrenia in later life. However, this recent study found the incidence of schizophrenia following CNS viral infection to be similar to that in the general population.

Researchers from the department of mental health and alcohol research, and the department of virology, both at the Finnish Public Health Institute, Helsinki, examined the medical records of patients born between 1969 and 2000, who had had CNS infections before their 15th birthdays. They identified 320 individuals and determined which had later been diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Of the 320 individuals, whose childhood diseases were caused by adenovirus in 30 cases, mumps in 84, enterovirus in 202 (including 40 caused by CBV-5) and by other viruses in 4 cases, 3 went on to develop schizophrenia. Two of these had suffered with enteroviral infections, 1 caused by CBV-5, and the third had had adenoviral meningitis. The cumulative incidence of schizophrenia was 0.94% in those who had suffered with any CNS viral infection and 0.99% in those who had had enteroviral CNS infections.

The researchers said that their data "provided no support" for the hypothesis that there was a link between childhood CNS infections, or enteroviral CNS infections, and schizophrenia, pointing out that their findings were from a sample that was 3-times larger than the 1966 birth cohort study. Nonetheless, it was still possible that individuals who had viral encephalitis were at increased risk of developing schizophrenia, they noted. This was because there was no information available about the reliability of diagnostic differentiation between viral meningitis and encephalitis in the 1960s and 1970s. The researchers also pointed out that their sample size was too small to examine a link between schizophrenia and CBV-5 CNS infections.
Am J Psychiatry 2003;160:6:1183-5. "Childhood central nervous system viral infections and adult schizophrenia"

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