The finding of Pedersen et al, regarding increased risk following moving residence to a more urban area during childhood or adolescence, may again support notions of the importance of social isolation.118 Social

adversity and life events Many have selleck products considered the role of social isolation and social disadvantage in increasing risk of psychosis. The mechanisms explaining associations between social factors and psychosis are likely to be complex, in a similar way to those Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical mediating the roles of ethnicity and urbanicity Factors such as access to health care, social support, self esteem, unemployment, and poor physical health will play a role.110 The interaction between perceptions of disadvantage and more direct Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical effects of adversity are also

difficult to disentangle. Low social class, a complex concept in itself, has been consistently found to be associated with schizophrenia, but the roles of social causation versus social drift have often been difficult to separate. Studies examining social class at birth, employed as a proxy for assessing social causation, have not been consistent in their findings.121,122 Byrne et al have Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical recently looked at the role of personal and parental social class in relation to first admission for schizophrenia using data from the Danish national registers.123 Risk of schizophrenia was associated with unemployment, low educational Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical attainment, being single, lower wealth status, low income, and being childless. Risk was also found to be associated with parental unemployment and parental lower income, but higher parental education. The authors concluded that personal rather than parental socioeconomic disadvantage had the greatest impact on onset of schizophrenia. Van Os et al found that single people were more likely to develop psychosis if they lived in areas with fewer single people compared to those where being single was apparently more common.124 As noted earlier, ethnic “minority status” has been found to

increase risk of psychosis,112 Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical and the importance of social adversity has also been raised during discussions regarding the impact of both ethnicity and urbanicity on rates of psychosis. Understanding the nature of social adversity more precisely is clearly an area that warrants further investigation. Finally, the occurrence of life events has been found to be associated with the onset and later with relapses Cell press in psychotic illnesses.125-127 Initial and early psychotic episodes are more likely than later episodes to be preceded by life events.128 Affective symptoms, particularly depression, and completed suicide may be precipitated by life events in those with a psychotic illness.129,130 The effect of personality- or illness-related factors in predisposing to the life events themselves is difficult to remove in these analyses.