But patients are also often paranoid, delusional, apathetic. Many have auditory or visual hallucinations. Upon autopsy, some schizophrenic brains show subtle defects of a kind that could have formed only during fetal development, indicating that the disease was in motion well before birth. Even more tantalizing, preliminary studies link traumas during a woman's pregnancy with a higher risk of schizophrenia in her child. Meggin Hollister, a University of Pennsylvania clinical psychologist whose sister has schizophrenia, looked at the blood protein known as Rh factor.
Maternal malnutrition seems to have a similar effect.
Children conceived during the height of the famine were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia. Other research has also tied maternal influenza to higher rates of the disease. An unlikely research tool, the home movie, is bolstering the idea that the tendency toward schizophrenia is inborn. Emory University researchers collected childhood movies of people who later developed the illness. Their fingers splayed.