Schizophrenia Daily News Blog

Predicting in Youth the Likelihood of the Later Development of Schizophrenia

Researchers believe that diagnosing mental illness early may help improve prognosis of the illness. Specific examples of this may be a reduction in the number of hospitalizations and an overall better approach to dealing with psychosis for sufferers. Now a new research study has demonstrated findings which suggest that youth who will go on to develop psychosis can be identified prior to full-blown development 35 percent of the time. Youth likely to develop mental illness are identified through known risk factors, and the accuracy of predicability increases from 35 to 60 and even 80 percent, when the youth show a combination of risk factors.

The study which was conducted on 291 at risk teenagers who had a median age of 16 found that some combination of the following risk factors in the teenagers predicted psychosis:

deteriorating social functioning (for example, spending increasing amounts of time alone in one’s room, doing nothing);

a family history of psychosis combined with recent decline in ability to function (such as a drop in grades not explained by other factors or an unexplained withdrawal from extracurricular school activities);

increase in unusual thoughts (such as thinking that strangers’ conversations are about oneself);

increase in suspicion/paranoia (such as suspicion of being followed); and

past or current drug abuse

The importance of not just acknowledging the risk factors but also assessing their ability to predict psychosis may help mental health professionals identify, educate and treat at risk youth sooner. There are many obvious benefits to this, one of which may be, that patients who are warned about the possibility of developing psychosis may be able to control certain factors such as drug use while engaging in preventative behaviors such as stress reduction and regular sleep schedules. This may help delay the onset and/or improve the prognosis of full-blown psychosis:

For people who develop a psychotic disorder, the outcome is best when treatment is offered as soon as possible after the psychotic episode and it's done in a sustained and coordinated way," said Robert Heinssen, study author and deputy director of the division of services and intervention research at the National Institute of Mental Health...

Prediction of Psychosis in Youth at High Clinical Risk., Cannon et al., Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2008;65(1):28-37.

Related Reading:
Preventing Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia Symptoms