Schizophrenia in the genetic isolate of Finland

Abstract

We compared the features of schizophrenia in the homogeneous population of Finland (population about 5,000,000) and in an internal isolate in northeastern Finland inhabited in the 1680s by a small group of founders (current population about 18,000) in a register-based epidemiological study. We identified all cases with a diagnosis of schizophrenia in Finland born between 1940-1969 using three national computerized registers and found a total of 267 schizophrenia patients in the internal isolate and 29,124 in Finland. The lifetime prevalence was 2.21% in the internal isolate and 1.21% in Finland, respectively. The age-corrected lifetime risk was 3.2% in the internal isolate and 1.1% in the whole country. The risk of schizophrenia to siblings in the internal isolate was 6.4% (95% confidence interval 0.052, 0.078), 9.1% (95% CI 0.062, 0.130), and 6.8% (95% CI 0.028, 0.135) given 1, 2, or 3 affected siblings, and for all Finland 4.2% (95% CI 0.036, 0.043), 6.4% (95% CI 0.058, 0.071), and 8.7% (95% CI 0.068, 0.107) given 1, 2, or 3, affected siblings, respectively. The mean number of children in schizophrenia families and thus the number of families having at least two affected individuals were clearly higher in the isolate (24.9% vs 9.2%). We did not find any other epidemiological features differing between these two regions. It seems that the family material collected from the internal isolate is a representative subsample from the entire country and hopefully it enables easier identification of at least some predisposing genes for schizophrenia due to its unique population structure.