Although the underlying neurobiology of emerging psychotic disorders is not well understood, there is a growing conviction that the study of patients at clinical high risk for the illness will provide important insights. Further, a better understanding of the transition period may help the development of novel therapies. In this review, we summarize the extant neuroimaging and neuropsychologica...

Psychiatric textbooks tend to describe psychosis as it is experienced by men. The well-documented illness of Zelda Fitzgerald illustrates the feminine side of psychosis. The distinctive features of Zelda's illness--its specific precipitants, the timing of its onset, the discontinuities in its course, the pronounced mood swings, the preservation of intellect and of agency, the maintenance of hum...

OBJECTIVE This research addresses the relationship of formal thought disorder in the early stages of psychotic illness to the long-term outcome of mental health many years later. The specific topic of concern was to evaluate the prognostic significance of thought disorder on the severity of psychosis over time. METHODS Subjects with new-onset psychosis were evaluated on a variety of measures ...

Background Insight and illness perception are two concepts of interest in the study of factors related to clinical outcome in patients with psychosis. Insight implies a risk of emotional distress for the patient. Illness perceptions, regardless of their accuracy, might be favorable or not to illness. Literature provides evidence of significant correlates of these factors with clinical outcome, ...

Diminished inhibitory gating of cerebral auditory evoked responses is transmitted in families with psychoses as an endophenotype related to the genetic risk for these illnesses. To assess whether the endophenotype is already expressed in infants of parents with psychotic illness and to assess effects of other known risk factors for schizophrenia, ie, maternal cigarette smoking and depression, i...

BACKGROUND Neuroanatomical abnormalities are a well-established feature of schizophrenia. However, the timing of their emergence and the extent to which they are related to vulnerability to the disorder as opposed to psychotic illness itself is unclear. AIMS To assess regional grey matter volume in the at-risk individuals who subsequently developed psychosis. METHOD Magnetic resonance imagi...

INTRODUCTION Males and females in the general population differ, on average, in their drive for empathizing (higher in females) and systemizing (higher in males). People with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) show a drive for systemizing over empathizing, irrespective of sex, which led to the conceptualisation of ASD as an 'extreme of the typical male brain'. The opposite cognitive profile, an 'ex...

OBJECTIVE While cognitive deficits are frequently reported in psychotic disorders, it is unclear whether these impairments predate the onset of illness and to what extent they are predictive of later transition to psychosis. METHOD The authors studied 37 healthy volunteers and 98 symptomatic, help-seeking patients meeting the inclusion criteria of a treatment program for people at ultra-high ...

A shallow olfactory sulcus has been reported in schizophrenia, possibly reflecting abnormal forebrain development during early gestation. However, it remains unclear whether this anomaly exists prior to the onset of psychosis and/or differs according to illness stage. In the current study, magnetic resonance imaging was used to investigate the length and depth of the olfactory sulcus in 135 ult...