Repeated Childhood Trauma Increases Psychosis Risk by Sevenfold: Study

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Children who have suffered multiple trauma throughout their childhood multiply their risk of suffering psychosis by sevenfold later in life.

The research published in the Journal of Psychiatric Research analyzed 60 pairs of siblings who participated in the research where the half suffered from psychosis and the other didn't.

While repeated childhood trauma can increase the risk of psychosis in adulthood by seven times, heavy cannabis use is also an added factor which increases the risk six times. Additionally, the personality trait called neuroticism or emotional stability also increases the risk by 30 percent for each point they answered in Eysenck Personality Test that they used. The researchers also used McNemar tests and paired-sample tests to find out which traits found in the two siblings are connected and not connected with psychosis.

According to Simply Psychology, Eysenck's Personality Theory is a personality test measured by using three dimensions: extraversion, psychoticism and neuroticism. It was developed by German-born psychologist Hans Eysenck.

In their study, researchers looked at the siblings with functional psychosis and compared it to their non-psychotic sibling. They found that repeated childhood trauma and heavy cannabis use (more than five times a week) can increase psychosis risk and a neurotic personality compounds it.

"Both childhood trauma and cannabis use were significantly associated with an increased risk of suffering functional psychosis", the researchers wrote in the journal. "A neurotic personality also contributed independently to this risk. These findings might help improve the prevention of psychosis and the development of specific treatment strategies in this specific population."

Previous research on psychosis has been published before but this is the first study done on pairs of psychotic and non-psychotic siblings.

"This work has the value of being the first one in being carried out in a clinical sample of psychotic and non-psychotic siblings, and it brings to light the need of doctors to inquire into these precedents when evaluating their patients", said co-authors Manuel Gurpegui and Jorge Cervilla, professors of Psychiatry at the University of Granada in Spain, via EurekAlert.

Several researchers from the London Institute of Psychiatry (United Kingdom), the University of Kansas (United States), Fundación Jiménez Díaz foundation, the Autonomous University of Madrid (Spain), the University of Southampton (United Kingdom), the University of Granada (Spain), and the Institute of Biomedicine of Seville (University Hospital Virgen del Rocío/CSIC/University of Seville, Spain) have contributed to the study.