Psychosis is a general term for a wide range of mental disorders, including schizophrenia, brief psychotic disorder, schizoaffective disorder, and delusional disorder or paranoid psychosis. Because its symptoms are complex and can intersect with other categories such as depression or bipolar disorder, psychotic disorders are difficult to identify.
Now, a study by researchers at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (USA) and eight other centers have created a new risk calculator that predicts a person’s future diagnosis of psychosis, based on warning symptoms. early.
“Until now, doctors were able to give patients a rough estimate of how their condition might progress, as 15 to 25% of people who have experienced early warning symptoms will develop a more serious disorder.” With this new risk calculator, doctors will now be able to offer patients an individualized risk assessment, with more precise information that will also allow patients to have a more realistic sense of what is happening, which can reduce their anxiety ” , explains Larry Seidman, co-author of the work.
To develop this risk calculator for mental disorders, the experts examined 596 participants between the ages of 12 and 35 who had been diagnosed with attenuated psychosis syndrome (which involves hallucinations and unusual thoughts, but being self-aware and self-aware. their perceptions are not real).
To measure these patients’ risk of developing schizophrenia in the future, the researchers created a risk calculator that examined several factors : stressful life events, trauma, family history of schizophrenia, age of onset of symptoms, levels of Unusual content of thought and mistrust, social functioning, verbal learning skills, and mental processing.
The volunteers were observed every six months, finding that 16% of them ended up having psychosis within two years. The experts found that several factors taken into account acted as predictors of psychosis, including decreased social functioning, verbal learning, and processing speed, as well as high levels of unusual thought content and mistrust. Also, if the patients were younger at the time their symptoms appeared, they appeared to be at higher risk of developing psychosis later in life.
“With this tool, clinicians can give people who have experienced early warning symptoms of schizophrenia a much more individualized risk assessment ,” says Tyrone Cannon, leader of the work.
The study has been published in The American Journal of Psychiatry.
