Mental disorders were significantly more likely in children whose mothers had one of five common autoimmune diseases, a new study found.
Previous research has linked both maternal and paternal autoimmune diseases and specific mental disorders, such as attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), but most of these studies focused on specific conditions in relatively small populations. The new study included data on more than 2 million births, making it one of the largest efforts to date to examine the association, according to the researchers, whose findings were published in JAMA Network Open.
Previous evidence of the possible association between certain maternal autoimmune diseases and mental disorders in offspring has been "scattered and limited," which "hampered an overall understanding" of the link, Fei Li, MD, the corresponding author of the study, told Medscape Medical News.
Li, of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, in China, and her colleagues reviewed data from a Danish registry cohort of singleton births with up to 38 years of follow-up. They explored associations between a range of maternal autoimmune diseases diagnosed before childbirth and the risks of mental disorders in children in early childhood through young adulthood.
The study population included 2,254,234 births and 38,916,359 person-years. Data on mental health were collected from the Psychiatric Central Research Register and the country's National Patient Register.
