I can't see any reason to doubt what seem to be significant genetic sex differences (Diseases of the Brain and Insanity Lancet 1845;1:253):
Baillarger found that
2. Maternal insanity had been transmitted to more than one child in 68 out of 271 cases; but paternal in only 30 out of 182.
3. Out of 346 children who had inherited the disease from the mother, 197 were girls and 149 boys. Of 215 inherited from the father, 87 were girls and 128 boys.
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Have these striking findings ever been replicated?
Dear Anthony,
There is always the chance that the father was unknown. However, some papers on the topic:
Article The Genetic Epidemiology of Schizophrenia in a Finnish Twin Cohort
Article Psychopathology and treatment of 30,344 twins in Sweden. II....
Article Heritability estimates for psychotic symptom dimensions in t...
I have read the 3 above abstracts, the first two of which do seem to rule out sex-specific effects. How then to explain Baillarger's results?
Jules Gabriel François Baillarger (25 March 1809 – 31 December 1890), was a French neurologist and psychiatrist. He is dead so we cannot ask him here on RG but we can envisage that he lacked sophisticated methods from today.
However, I suggest that you discuss this problem with the authors alive here on RG.
"we can envisage that he lacked sophisticated methods".
I don't think the answer lies in his use of unsophisticated methods, more likely in some sort of undetected bias, assuming of course that it was he that was mistaken. Baillarger must have been doing a lot right to anticipate the anticipation effect generally attributed to Mott in 1910 (see Am. J. Hum. Genet. 60:630-637, 1997 Anticipation or Ascertainment Bias in Schizophrenia? Penrose's Familial Mental Illness Sample by Anne S. Bassett and Janice Husted):
"It results, from the facts I have collected, that the insanity generally becomes developed in the children at an earlier age than that at which it had declared itself in the relations...This is one of the causes which will always prevent statistics in hereditary transmission from being rigidly exact. Because a patient has had no relations insane at the time of his coming under observation, it must not be concluded that the insanity is not hereditary; for some years afterward, perhaps, the invasion of the disease in another relation will reveal the predisposition". (Lancet 1845;1:722),
My breeding experiments on a low level of phylogeny, i.e. in mice have concerned their level of aggression. Some parents claim they get the craziness from their children. After all heredity is only one factor in a vulnerable person.
"Some parents claim they get the craziness from their children."
And they are not wrong. I have just been at a lecture where it was found in a prospective study that their internalizing problems led to maternal depression, not vice versa.
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