Incidence of adult onset schizophrenic disorders in the US Military: Patterns by sex, race and age

Medical screening of military applicants prevents persons with overt or a reported history of psychosis, and most with serious behavior problems, from enlisting; therefore, first hospitalization is likely to reflect new illness. No pre-military socioeconomic data were available, however, essentially all study subjects were high school graduates; unmeasured differences in socioeconomic status were unlikely to explain the observed results. This report may provide lower bound estimates of the schizophrenic disorder incidence in the United States.