No Association between Prenatal Viral Infection and Depression in Later Life—A Long-Term Cohort Study of 6152 Subjects
Bibliographic record
Abstract
OBJECTIVE: Previous studies have suggested a role for prenatal viral infections in the etiology of schizophrenia; however, little is known about depression. We examined whether in-utero viral infections result in increased risk of depression in later life. METHOD: We identified a cohort (n = 3076) born between 1946 and 1980, whose mothers suffered known viral infections in pregnancy. Subjects were individually matched by birthdate, sex, and area of birth to another cohort (n = 3076) from the UK National Health Service Central Register (NHSCR). These 2 cohorts, one exposed to viruses prenatally, the other not known to have been exposed, were then followed-up to June 1996 by sending a morbidity questionnaire to their primary care physicians. This included specific items on affective disorders, schizophrenia, mental handicap (mental retardation), epilepsy, as well as other central nervous system disorders and specified physical illness, all coded according to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Edition. Death certificates were supplied by the NHSCR. A method for matched-pair cohort data calculated the relative risk and 95% confidence intervals for depression in the exposed and unexposed cohorts by varying type of viral exposure. RESULTS: The response to the questionnaire was high (85%). There was no overall increased risk for depression associated with viral exposure; a narrow confidence interval surrounded unity (RR = 1.0, 95% CI 0.8 to 1.2); effects for individual viral exposures were all scattered around unity. CONCLUSIONS: The results provide no support for the hypothesis that in-utero exposure to viral infection is associated with risk of subsequent nonpsychotic affective disorder. Further analyses on schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and mental illness other than depression are required.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".