Schizophrenia, that mental disorder that usually develops in adolescence and is characterized by delusions, abnormal thoughts, hallucinations and uncontrolled body movements, seems to have found a tough rival: intelligence itself.
People with a high IQ are less likely to develop schizophrenia , even if they have a genetic predisposition to this disease. The higher the intelligence, the lower the risk anyway. In the same way, a low IQ increases the risk of suffering from schizophrenia. This is the conclusion that emerges from the latest study from Virginia Commonwealth University (USA) and published in the American Journal of Psychiatry .
” If you’re very smart, your schizophrenia genes don’t have much of a chance to act, ” says study leader Kenneth S. Kendler.
To reach this conclusion, the researchers analyzed the IQ of 1,204,983 Swedish men (some with schizophrenic relatives) between the ages of 18 and 20 and used a theoretical model to calculate how IQ influenced the risk of developing schizophrenia The results revealed, after research that ran from 1951 to 2010, that people with a low IQ were more likely to develop the disease than those with a high IQ. Furthermore, this relationship became much more palpable in the participants with a family history linked to schizophrenia .
“Having a slightly lower IQ carries a high risk of schizophrenia. Failure to achieve a high IQ leads to schizophrenia gaining extra strength due to its genetic makeup and family history, ”explains Kendler. This, however, does not mean that highly intelligent people can de facto rid themselves of the disease . Without going any further, we have the example of the mathematician John Nash (Nobel Prize in Economics in 1994).
