LONDON: Immigrants in Denmark are more than twice as likely as native Danes to develop schizophrenia, but psychologists said on Saturday they do not know why.

People from Australia, Africa, the Middle East and Greenland who have moved to Denmark have the highest risk of suffering from the disorder, while those from Scandinavia have the lowest.

“Immigrants were a little bit more than twice as likely as native Danes to develop schizophrenia,” said Dr Elizabeth Cantor-Graae, of the University of Lund in Sweden.

In a study of 2.1 million people born between 1954 and 1983 who were living in Denmark by their 15th birthday, Cantor-Graae and her team found that the risk of developing the illness was 2.45 times higher in first generation immigrants than Danes after a maximum follow-up time of 40 years.

Cantor-Graae said the findings reported in the British Journal of Psychiatry suggest that the focus of future studies on schizophrenia should be more on immigration and not on the vulnerability of specific ethnic groups.

Although people from Australia, Africa, the Middle East and Greenland had the highest risk of schizophrenia there is no obvious indication of what the common denominator could be.—Reuters