Pathways of risk from conception to disease: a population-based study of the offspring of women with bipolar disorder and schizophrenia

Our aim in this study is to integrate genetic and risk factor epidemiology under a developmental perspective in order to examine reproductive pathology in women with severe mental illness and follow-up proximal and distal developmental and neuropsychiatric sequelae in their children.

This is a whole-of-population record linkage study, using linkage across psychiatric, physical morbidity, mortality and other administrative registers in Western Australia to follow up a large whole-of-population cohort of 467,945 children born between 1980 and 2001 to 246,874 mothers. This includes 15,486 births to 7508 mothers with a psychotic illness.

In the course of this study, we have developed and refined a number of instruments, including the Diagnostic Interview for Psychoses (casenotes version) and the Children’s Checklist, extended the McNeil-Sjöström Scale for Obstetric Complications; and developed measures of neonatal encephalopathy and maternal morbidity over time. We are currently building measures of adversity.

Contact

Dr Vera Morgan +61 8 9224 0235
Professor Assen Jablensky +61 8 9347 6416