Is schizophrenia hereditary?

Schizophrenia is a functional mental illness. This disease has a great impact on families and society, and the disease has a high heritability. Therefore, families with schizophrenia are not suitable for having children. If you want to have children, you should get relevant consultation.

(1) Through a systematic family tree survey of schizophrenia patients (surveying three generations of their paternal and maternal lines), it was found that the prevalence of mental illness among family members of schizophrenia patients was 6.2 times higher than that of the general population.

(2) Some scholars conducted a survey on 65 families and found that if both parents suffered from schizophrenia, the probability of their children suffering from the disease was 35% to 68% (the probability of suffering from the disease refers to the possibility that an individual in the population will suffer from the disease throughout his or her life). The normal population has a rate of only 0.86% to 1%.

(3) A survey of schizophrenia twins found that the concordance rate of monozygotic twins (twins fertilized by one egg and two sperm) is 4-6 times higher than that of dizygotic twins (twins fertilized by two eggs and two sperm).

(4) Children of schizophrenia patients are placed in foster homes with mentally healthy parents , while children of mentally healthy parents are also placed in foster homes with mentally healthy parents. As a result, 19.1% of the children of schizophrenia parents suffer from schizophrenia and intellectual disability, while none of the children of mentally healthy parents suffer from mental illness.

Many studies have provided evidence that genetic factors are an important part of the etiology of schizophrenia. The closer the blood relationship, the more prominent the influence of genetic factors.

However, schizophrenia is generally not directly described as a "genetic disease" for the following reasons:

①There is no consensus on its inheritance mode and genetic transmission method.

② According to clinical observation data, there are indeed a considerable number of schizophrenia patients who have no family history (there are no mentally ill patients in the three generations of the family on both the paternal and maternal sides).

In short, schizophrenia is closely related to genetics, so families with a family history of schizophrenia are advised not to have children. However, this does not mean that the children of patients with mental illness will definitely inherit the mental illness. If you are very eugenics conscious, you can consult an expert in genetics.