Hansen Niels, Juhl Aaron Levin, Grenzer Insa Maria, Teegen Bianca, Wiltfang Jens, Fitzner Dirk
Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Translational Psychoneuroscience, University of Göttingen, Göttingen, Germany.
Front Psychiatry. 2022 Jul 7;13:937620. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2022.937620. eCollection 2022.
City living might lead to a higher risk of psychiatric disease, but to date there is no evidence of any correlation between an urban environment and the occurrence of neural autoantibodies in psychiatric disease. Our aim is to identify whether the number of patients with and without neural autoantibodies living in diverse rural and urban environments differ.
We enrolled retrospectively a cohort of 167 psychiatric patients a cross-sectional design from the Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy University Medical Center Göttingen and determined serum and/or CSF neural autoantibodies in them. The patients live in the German states of Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and Hessen. Their data were investigated in conjunction with the location of their primary residence. We categorized them into five different categories depending upon their primary residence: one rural and four different urban environments depending on their population numbers.
We identified 36 psychiatric patients with neural autoantibodies, and 131 psychiatric patients with none. In total, 24 psychiatric patients with neural autoantibodies were classified as sharing a possible, probable, or definitive autoimmune origin according to our recently set criteria. We observed as a non-significant trend that more psychiatric patients with neural autoantibodies and a probable or definitive autoimmune origin (45.8%) live in a major city with over 100,000 inhabitants than do psychiatric patients presenting no evidence of autoantibodies (26.4%). However, we identified no relevant differences between (1) psychiatric patients with and without neural autoantibodies or between (2) psychiatric patients with a possible, probable, or definitive autoimmune origin and those without such autoantibodies in relation to the diverse rural and urban environmental settings.
The inherently different aspects of rural and urban environments do not appear to be relevant in determining the frequency of neural autoantibodies in psychiatric patients in Lower Saxony, Thuringia, and Hessen in Germany. Furthermore, large-scale studies involving other states across Germany should be conducted to exclude any regional differences and to examine the tendency of a higher frequency in large cities of autoimmune-mediated psychiatric syndromes.
城市生活可能会导致患精神疾病的风险更高，但迄今为止，尚无证据表明城市环境与精神疾病中神经自身抗体的发生之间存在任何关联。我们的目的是确定生活在不同农村和城市环境中的有神经自身抗体和无神经自身抗体的患者数量是否存在差异。
我们采用回顾性队列研究，从哥廷根大学医学中心精神病学与心理治疗科选取了167名精神科患者，采用横断面设计，并测定了他们血清和/或脑脊液中的神经自身抗体。这些患者生活在德国下萨克森州、图林根州和黑森州。我们结合他们的主要居住地对其数据进行了调查。根据他们的主要居住地，我们将他们分为五个不同类别：一个农村地区和四个不同的城市环境，具体取决于人口数量。
我们确定了36名有神经自身抗体的精神科患者和131名无神经自身抗体的精神科患者。根据我们最近制定的标准，总共有24名有神经自身抗体的精神科患者被归类为可能、很可能或肯定具有自身免疫起源。我们观察到一个无统计学意义的趋势，即与无自身抗体证据的精神科患者（26.4%）相比，有神经自身抗体且可能或肯定具有自身免疫起源的精神科患者（45.8%）更多地生活在居民超过10万的大城市。然而，我们没有发现（1）有和无神经自身抗体的精神科患者之间，或（2）可能、很可能或肯定具有自身免疫起源的精神科患者与无此类自身抗体的精神科患者之间，在不同农村和城市环境方面存在相关差异。
农村和城市环境的内在不同方面似乎与德国下萨克森州、图林根州和黑森州精神科患者中神经自身抗体的频率无关。此外，应该开展涉及德国其他州的大规模研究，以排除任何地区差异，并研究自身免疫介导的精神综合征在大城市中出现频率更高的趋势。
