‘The study confirms this increased risk and helps us to better understand what factors influence mental health problems in patients’ children’, explains Josefina Castro Fornieles, the coordinator of the study, the leader of the IDIBAPS research group Child and adolescent psychiatry and psychology, the head of the Institute of Neuroscience at Hospital Clínic Barcelona and a mental health researcher at CIBER (CIBERSAM). The study was conducted jointly with the Gregorio Marañón Hospital in Madrid, with Dolores Moreno as the principal investigator.
The study followed the children of patients with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder for four years, compared to a control group of parents without these conditions. The study included 238 children between the ages of 6 and 17 who were evaluated at the beginning and end of this period. Variables analysed included the psychiatric diagnoses of parents and children, the family’s socioeconomic status, the age of the parents at the child’s birth and the presence of subclinical symptoms related to schizophrenia or bipolar disorder.
Elena de la Serna, a researcher at IDIBAPS-Hospital Clínic and CIBERSAM and the first author of the article, says: ‘Whilst children of individuals with schizophrenia have a higher risk of attention deficit disorder, disruptive behaviour disorders and subclinical psychotic symptoms, the children of patients with bipolar disorder show a higher prevalence of mood disorders, attention deficit disorder and subclinical bipolar symptoms. Furthermore, symptom patterns vary based on the parental diagnosis’.
The study also highlights factors that can mitigate this risk. For instance, better parental psychosocial functioning and higher socioeconomic status are associated with a lower incidence of mental health problems in children, underscoring the importance of family and social influences.
This study, which is part of the BASYS project, bolsters the importance of long-term monitoring of children of patients with serious mental illness and raises the need to design preventive strategies for these high-risk populations. ‘Though studies with larger samples are needed, this research helps us to better understand the mechanisms of intergenerational transmission of vulnerability to mental disorders in childhood and adolescence’, the research team concludes.
Reference article:
De la Serna E, Moreno D, Sugranyes G, Camprodon-Boadas P, Ilzarbe D, Bigorra A, et al. Effects of parental characteristics on the risk of psychopathology in offspring: a 4-year follow-up study. Eur Child Adolesc Psychiatry. 2025.
