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Potential Schizophrenia Prevention Through Choline Supplementation During Pregnancy

, an essential nutrient similar to the B vitamin and found in foods such as liver, muscle meats, fish, nuts and eggs, when given as a in the last two and in early infancy, is showing a lower rate of physiological schizophrenic risk factors in 33 days old. The study breaks new ground both in its potentially therapeutic findings and in its strategy to target markers of schizophrenia long before the illness itself actually appears. Choline is also being studied for potential benefits in , including chronic hepatitis and cirrhosis, depression, memory loss, Alzheimer’s disease and dementia, and certain types of seizures.


Normally, the brain responds fully to an initial clicking sound but inhibits its response to a second click that follows immediately. In schizophrenia patients, deficient inhibition is common and is related to poor sensory filtering and familial transmission of schizophrenia risk. Since schizophrenia does not usually appear until adolescence, this trait – measurable in infancy – was chosen to represent the illness.



The study will be published online by The American Journal of Psychiatry (AJP) at AJP in Advance, its online-ahead-of-print website. The research was funded by the Institute for Children’s Mental Disorders, the Anschutz Family Foundation, and the National Institute of Mental Health.

University of Colorado Denver