India, Dec. 27 -- A research team led by the Department of Paediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, School of Clinical Medicine, LKS Faculty of Medicine, the University of Hong Kong (HKUMed), has conducted a pioneering study that established a causal link between childhood maltreatment (CM) and various neuropsychiatric disorders. By employing genomic analysis on neuropsychiatric data from over 500,000 individuals and CM data from over 140,000 cases, the study found that CM victims face a nearly five-fold increased lifetime risk of developing schizophrenia. Furthermore, the findings indicate that CM significantly elevates the risk of multiple neuropsychiatric disorders through altered behavioral patterns, cognitive abilities, and genomic changes...