Предсказывание психоза

Stephan Ruhrmann et al. claim to have found a good way of predicting who'll go on to develop psychosis in their paper Prediction of Psychosis in Adolescents and Young Adults at High Risk. This is based on the European Prediction of Psychosis Study (EPOS) which was run at a number of early detection clinics in Britain and Europe. People were referred to the clinics through various channels if someone was worried they seemed a bit, well, prodromal.

245 people consented to take part in the study and met the inclusion criteria meaning they were at "high risk of psychosis" according to at least one of two different systems, the Ultra High Risk (UHR) or the COGDIS criteria. Both class you as being at risk if you show short lived or mild symptoms a bit like those seen in schizophrenia i.e.

COGDIS: inability to divide attention; thought interference, pressure, and blockage; and disturbances of receptive and expressive speech, disturbance of abstract thinking, unstable ideas of reference, and captivation of attention by details of the visual field...

UHR: unusual thought content/ delusional ideas, suspiciousness/persecutory ideas, grandiosity, perceptual abnormalities/hallucinations, disorganized communication, and odd behavior/appearance... Brief limited intermittent psychotic symptoms (BLIPS) i.e. hallucinations, delusions, or formal thought disorders that occurred resolved spontaneously within 1 week...

Then they followed up the 245 kids for 18 months and saw what happened to them.

What happened was that 37 of them developed full-blown psychosis: 23 suffered schizophrenia according to DSM-IV criteria, indicating severe and prolonged symptoms; 6 had mood disorders, i.e depression or bipolar disorder, with psychotic features, and the rest mostly had psychotic episodes too short to be classed as schizophrenia. 37 people is 19% of the 183 for whom full 18 month data was available; the others dropped out of the study, or went missing for some reason.

Is 19% high or low? Well, it's much higher than the rate you'd see in randomly selected people, because the risk of getting schizophrenia is less than 1% lifetime and this was only 18 months; the risk of a random person developing psychosis in any given year has been estimated at 0.035% in Britain. So the UHR and COGDIS criteria are a lot better than nothing.

On the other hand 19% is far from being "all": 4 out of 5 of the supposedly "high risk" kids in this study didn't in fact get ill, although some of them probably developed illness after the 18 month period was over.

Predicting Psychosis