SynthesisEuropean archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience2020
Migration and schizophrenia: meta-analysis and explanatory framework.
Synthesis in European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 41 papers, 5 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
41 citing papers in PubMed, 5 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 93 citations in OpenAlex.
- Specificity of environmental risk factors for schizophrenia, bipolar disorders, and depressive disorders - umbrella review.Psychological medicine · 2025Pooled it
- Eating disorders among international migrants: a systematic review and meta-analysis.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2024Pooled it
- Racism and psychosis: an umbrella review and qualitative analysis of the mental health consequences of racism.European archives of psychiatry and clinical neuroscience · 2023Pooled it
- Traumatic Events, Social Adversity and Discrimination as Risk Factors for Psychosis - An Umbrella Review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Pooled it
- Risk of Psychosis Among Refugees: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis.JAMA psychiatry · 2019Pooled it
- Do Genetic Variants Directly Shape Population-Level Schizophrenia Burden? A Global Genomic Analysis.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2026Article
- Elucidating the Complex Etiology of Schizophrenia: Comprehensive Insights into the Therapeutic Roles of Natural Compounds and Pharmacological Interventions.Current pharmaceutical design · 2026Review
- Policy paper of the Committee on Ethics and Task Force on Migration and Mental Health: Migration and mental health of migrants, refugees, asylum seekers - Ethical dilemmas and concerns.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2025Review
- Combining the Risk: The Poly-Environmental Risk Score and Psychotic Symptoms in Adolescents.Schizophrenia bulletin · 2025Article
- The validity of diagnoses of non-affective psychotic disorder including schizophrenia in Swedish registers revisited - are the diagnoses valid for migrants and Swedish-born?BMC psychiatry · 2025Article
- New pharmacological approaches in the treatment of schizophrenia.Pharmacological reports : PR · 2025Review
- A report from the WPA Working Group on Providing Mental Health Care for Migrants and Refugees.World psychiatry : official journal of the World Psychiatric Association (WPA) · 2024Article
- Sociodemographic Variables in Offender and Non-Offender Patients Diagnosed with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders-An Explorative Analysis Using Machine Learning.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Maternal vitamin D levels during pregnancy and offspring schizophrenia.Schizophrenia research · 2024Article
- Incidence of non-affective psychotic disorders in refugees and peers growing up in Denmark and Sweden: a registry linkage study.Social psychiatry and psychiatric epidemiology · 2024Article
- Climate change and mental health: Position paper of the European Psychiatric Association.European psychiatry : the journal of the Association of European Psychiatrists · 2024Review
- Downregulation of miR-29a as a possible diagnostic biomarker for schizophrenia.Molecular biology reports · 2024Article
- [The German Center for Mental Health : Innovative translational research to promote prevention, targeted intervention and resilience].Der Nervenarzt · 2024Review
- Digital Interventions for Relapse Prevention, Illness Self-Management, and Health Promotion In Schizophrenia: Recent Advances, Continued Challenges, and Future Opportunities.Current treatment options in psychiatry · 2023Article
- Migrants' mental health recovery in Italian reception facilities.Communications medicine · 2023Article
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
7 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Systematic reviews and meta-analyses suggest that there are increased rates of schizophrenia and related psychoses in first- and second-generation migrants and refugees. Here, we present a meta-analysis on the incidence of non-affective psychotic disorders among first- and second-generation migrants. We found substantial evidence for an increased relative risk of incidence among first- and second-generation migrants compared to the native population. As heterogeneity of included studies was high, effect estimates should be interpreted with caution and as guiding values rather than exact risk estimates. We interpret our findings in the context of social exclusion and isolation stress, and provide an explanatory framework that links cultural differences in verbal communication and experienced discrimination with the emergence of psychotic experiences and their neurobiological correlates. In this context, we discuss studies observing stress-dependent alterations of dopamine neurotransmission in studies among migrants versus non-migrants as well as in subjects with psychotic disorders. We suggest that social stress effects can impair contextualization of the meaning of verbal messages, which can be accounted for in Bayesian terms by a reduced precision of prior beliefs relative to sensory data, causing increased prediction errors and resulting in a shift towards the literal or "concrete" meaning of words. Compensatory alterations in higher-level beliefs, e.g., in the form of generalized interpretations of ambiguous interactions as hostile behavior, may contribute to psychotic experiences in migrants. We thus suggest that experienced discrimination and social exclusion is at the core of increased rates of psychotic experiences in subjects with a migration background.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.