Scientists at UCLA have found that female infants possessing a specific immune gene closely resembling their mothers' are more susceptible to developing schizophrenia later in life.
The study, which appears in the October issue of the American Journal of Human Genetics, tested 274 Finnish families in which at least one child had been diagnosed with schizophrenia or a related disease. Analysis of the families' DNA revealed that daughters with an HLA-B gene, a gene from the human leukocyte antigen (HLA) complex related to the immune system, that highly resembled their mothers' were 1.7 times more likely to develop schizophrenia than those who did not.
Read more: HLA-B Maternal-Fetal Genotype Matching Increases Risk of Schizophrenia (Abstract / Full text)