Perinatal complications and schizophrenia. Data from the Maternal and Child Health Handbook in Japan.

A number of studies have shown that schizophrenics have increased obstetric complications compared with controls, but conflicting negative results have also been reported. Similarly, some studies found that obstetric complications were more frequently observed among male or nonfamilial schizophrenics than their female or familial schizophrenic counterparts, but others reported negative or inverse results. Since 1948 in Japan, every pregnant woman has been assigned a Maternal and Child Health Handbook in which obstetricians have been obliged to fill in obstetric data. In the current study, perinatal complications assessed using the scale of Parnas et al. (1982), based on information from the maternal and child health handbook were compared between DSM-III-R-diagnosed schizophrenics (N = 59), their healthy siblings (N = 31), and controls (N = 108). We found that female schizophrenics had experienced significantly more perinatal complications than siblings and controls. We could not detect any significant association between perinatal complications and family history.