Flu During Pregnancy Linked With Increased Risk of Bipolar Disorder in Child

Mothers who suffer from flu during pregnancy have an increased risk of having a child with bipolar disorder, a new study has found.

People who suffer from bipolar disorder undergo radical mood swings - from being depressed to being highly excited. The age of onset of this disorder is 25 years, and about 5.7 million American adults, or about 2.6 percent of the U.S. population age 18 and older suffers from bipolar disorder in a given year.

The study was conducted by researchers from Columbia University and Kaiser Permanente. The study team looked at data of people born between 1959 and 1966 in the Kaiser Permanente health system. Researchers then matched records of mothers getting flu during pregnancy with the psychiatric history of their children.

They found that among 92 people who were diagnosed with bipolar later in life, four had been exposed to flu in the womb. Previous research has linked flu during pregnancy with an increased risk of autism in the baby. Another study had earlier found a link between flu during pregnancy and a risk of developing schizophrenia.

The study results showed that there was some co-relation between maternal flu and risk of bipolar disorder, and not a cause-and-effect relation. However, researchers said that preventing flu in pregnant women may reduce the risk of the disorder.

"Mothers should stay away from people who have the flu," said Dr. Alan Brown, professor of clinical psychiatry and clinical epidemiology at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York City and co-author of the study, reports HealthDay. He added that "women should not be greatly concerned, because a fourfold increase is pretty high from an epidemiological standpoint, but still the vast majority of the offspring did not get bipolar disorder."

The study is published in the journal JAMA Psychiatry.