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Objective: It is common acceptance that schizophrenia is a neurodevelopmental defect. According to this opinion, most of the schizophrenic individuals have premorbid neurological abnormalities (eg. Associality, neurological signs, minor physical abnormalities, decreased cognitive and neuromotor functioning). Some of these cognitive abnormalities in schizophrenic individuals display a familial similarity. The risk of schizophrenia occurrence in the children, whose parents are schizophrenic is higher than in the children that have healthy parents. According to this data, this study aims to find out the value of the behavioral abnormalities; attention, memory and executive function deficits in the offspring of schizophrenic parent as predictors of the disease.
Method: In the study 30 offspring of schizophrenic parent(s); 25 offspring of bipolar disorder patients and 30 offspring of healthy parents were evaluated. Age range of cases for all groups is 9 to 15 years. To all offspring, Achenbach Behevioral Check List, Edinburgh Handedness Inventory, Alexander IQ Test, Digit Span Test, Corsi Block’s Test, WMS Visual Reproduction Test, WMS Story Recall Test, Stroop Colour Word Test, Wisconsin Card Sorting Test, Verbal Fluency Test, Luria Test’s were performed.
Results: According to the Behavioral Check List, behavioral disturbances were more prevalent in offspring of schizophrenia and bipolar patients then the offspring of healthy parents. IQ scores were similar in three groups. No differences were found between three groups according to the Verbal Fluency Test, Digit Span Test, Corsi Block’s Test and WCST.
Conclusion: In the offspring of schizophrenia parents some behavioral and cognitive abnormalities were found, but this was not group-specific and similar abnormalities were found in the offspring of bipolar affective disorder patients too. It is needed to perform a long-term follow-up for evaluation of these results as a marker of schizophrenia. Discussion: In this study, we did not find any difference between three groups in terms of IQ score. There are a lot of studies with similar findings. There are a few studies about the neurocognitive functions of offspring of bipolar patients, but there are a lot of studies about the neurocognitive functions of schizophrenia offspring. Thus, it is difficult to compare our findings with the literature. Schizophrenia related risk studies support the neurocognitive hypothesis of schizophrenia. Our study and many others found neurodevelopmental and behavioral disturbances in schizophrenia offspring, but they are not specific to schizophrenia, and may be applicable in bipolar offspring too.