“Two that sleep in a mattress, become the same condition,” is a quite heard Spanish saying with its many variations and the reality is that they are right. Or at least in the part of mental illnesses. This has been determined A great scientific study that has made it clear that couples share psychiatric disorders.
A matter of probability. A team of researchers has discovered that people with a psychiatric disorder are more likely to marry someone who suffers from the same pathology as with someone who does not have it.
A pattern, previously observed in Nordic countries, which has now been confirmed to a larger scale with data from Taiwan, Denmark or Sweden with different cultural contexts, which has been reflected in a study published in Nature Human Behaviour.
What was analyzed. The study analyzed data of more than 14.8 million people in Taiwan, Denmark and Sweden, examining the prevalence of nine psychiatric disorders in pairs: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depressionanxiety, attention deficit disorder with hyperactivity (ADHD), autism, obsessive-compulsive disorder (TOC), substance consumption disorder and nervous anorexia.
Clear results. When one of the couple’s members was diagnosed with one of these conditions, the other had a significantly greater probability of being diagnosed with it or with another psychiatric condition.
According to Chun Chieh Fan, co -author of the study and researcher of genetics and populations in the Laureate Institute for Brain Research in Tulsa, Oklahoma, “the main result is that the pattern is maintained through countries, cultures and of course, generations.”
The trend is to share diagnosis. Another relevant point of this study is that the observation revealed that, for most disorders, the possibilities that couples share a diagnosis increased slightly with each decade from the 30s to 90, especially in disorders related to substance consumption.
However, some cultural differences were found. For example, in Taiwan, married couples were more likely to share a diagnosis of TOC than couples in Nordic countries.
What’s behind the trend. The first theory that arises in this case is the attraction for similarity. In this case, people could be attracted to those who look like them, surely because they are the ones who can better understand a suffering that is shared.
But it also points to the possibility that a shared environment could make couples become more similar with time. Or even that the stigma associated with psychiatric disorders causes the options to be reduced by a person.
The environment also contributes. Other experts, such as Jan Fullerton, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia, add that social and environmental stress factors could contribute to a new diagnosis in a previously not affected couple, especially if they already had milder and non -diagnosed symptoms.
There are genetic implications. Since genetics plays a role in the development of psychiatric disorders, the tendency to choose a couple with similar psychiatric symptoms increases the risk that these disorders appear in future generations.
In fact, the study found that the children of parents who share the same disorder have twice as probabilities to develop the same condition compared to children who only have an affected parent.
Images | Brooke Cagle
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