Children's Self-Reported Psychotic Symptoms and Adult Schizophreniform Disorder

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Abstract
THE SEARCH for childhood risk factors has played a central role in the quest to uncover the etiologies of schizophrenia and related disorders. Studies examining such risk factors have mainly used retrospective case-control, prospective high-risk, or population-based cohort designs. Retrospective studies are prone to selection and recall bias,1 and prospective high-risk studies2-5 tend to evaluate relatively small samples of children, resulting in low statistical power. Over the past decade, the "coming of age" of many birth cohort studies has seen the population-based cohort design gain prominence as the method of choice for investigating childhood risk factors for schizophrenia. Risk factors identified to date include obstetric complications,6,7 place and time of birth,8 delayed motor and language development,9 cognitive risk factors,9-11 and social-behavioral risk factors.9,10,12-14