Schizophrenia & Cities
Schizophrenia is associated with both biological vulnerabilities and environmental factors, which interact in complex ways to influence the onset and progression of the disease.
Schizophrenia is associated with living in densely populated areas. This association, together with the disorder's links to socioeconomic disadvantage, raises questions about potential reverse causality: might individuals showing early signs of the disorder or those at higher risk gravitate towards cities and fall in social standing, or might urban environments themselves exert harmful effects? Additionally, genetic research has shown that those with a higher genetic risk for schizophrenia are more likely to reside in urban or densely populated areas, pointing to the necessity of updating the social stress model of schizophrenia to incorporate genetic factors and potential interactions between genes and the environment.
The "Berlin Research Initiative for Diagnostics, Genetics, and Environmental Factors of Schizophrenia" (abbreviated: BRIDGE-S) investigates risk and protective factors associated with the development of schizophrenia. These include both genetic factors and a range of environmental factors, as well as their possible interactions. Therefore, BRIDGE-S involves both the collection of a saliva sample and the completion of various questionnaires, including on urbanicity.
According to current research, both genetic risk factors and environmental factors contribute to the development of schizophrenia. Environmental factors are generally all external influences that directly or indirectly affect an individual and influence their development and life. Previous studies have focused primarily on individual environmental factors such as urbanity ("Are people who grew up in urban areas at higher risk of schizophrenia?"), cannabis and other drug use ("To what extent does cannabis consumption contribute to the onset of psychosis?"), trauma ("Do traumatic experiences in childhood and adolescence play a role?"), migration, complications during pregnancy and at birth, and a series of previous infectious diseases, which have been associated with a higher risk for schizophrenia. In contrast to the already implicated risk factors are influences on an individual that provide protection against the development of a disease - the so-called resilience factors. These can be both genetic and psychosocial.
However, the interplay of various risk factors in the development of schizophrenic psychoses is not yet fully understood. The same applies to the research of certain environmental influences that are believed to protectively counteract the development of a schizophrenic disorder. The BRIDGE-S has set itself the goal of further investigating factors that mediate risk and protection in connection with schizophrenia. To also draw clinically relevant conclusions, a large number of participants without schizophrenia and with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder are tested. In the long term, we aim to make a significant scientific contribution to the prevention and early detection of schizophrenia.
This study is funded by the following institutions:
Charité Universitätsmedizin, Berlin, Germany
Stanley Center for Psychiatric Research, Broad Institute, Boston, MA, USA
Brain & Behavior Research Foundation | NARSAD grants, NY, NY, USA
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft e.V. (DFG), Bonn, Germany
The team from the editorial office of 3sat/nano visited us at our facilities in Berlin on September 27, 2019.
In a 6-minute segment titled "Genome as Oracle," our study leader, Prof. Dr. med. Stephan Ripke, Ph.D., is interviewed, and the segment further explains what we are researching.
The segment was aired on October 21, 2019, on the nano show (3sat) and is available in the media library.
It is also available in German in the media library of the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation (SRF).