IT’S one of the stranger sounding ideas in psychiatry—that your chances
of developing schizophrenia depend on how sunny it was months before you were
even born.
But evidence is accumulating to support the theory that vitamin D deficiency
during pregnancy, caused by a lack of sunlight, can alter the development of a
child’s brain in the womb. The data for a link with schizophrenia is still
controversial, but potentially worrying because vitamin D deficiency is so
common.
Vitamin D’s role in building healthy brains had been largely ignored, until
researchers began to spot some curious epidemiological trends. People who…
