BACKGROUND It is unknown whether prodromal services improve outcomes in those who go on to develop psychosis, and whether these patients are demographically different from the overall first-episode population. AIMS To compare sociodemographic features, duration of untreated psychosis, hospital admission and frequency of compulsory treatment in the first year after the onset of psychosis in pa...

Phenotypic heterogeneity within patients and controls may explain why the genetic variants contributing to schizophrenia risk explain only a fraction of the heritability. The aim of this study is to investigate quantitative and qualitative differences in psychosis symptoms in a sample including psychosis patients, their relatives, and community controls. We combined factor analysis and latent c...

Cognitive models of psychosis propose that maladaptive appraisals of anomalous experiences contribute to distress and disability in psychosis. Attentional, attributional and reasoning biases are hypothesised to drive these threat-based appraisals. Experimental and self-report data have provided support for the presence of these biases in psychosis populations, but recently there have been calls...

BACKGROUND Advances in the ability to identify people at high risk of developing psychosis have generated interest in the possibility of preventing psychosis. AIMS To evaluate the efficacy of cognitive therapy for the prevention of transition to psychosis. METHOD A randomised controlled trial compared cognitive therapy with treatment as usual in 58 patients at ultra-high risk of developing ...

This publication offers a review of the pharmacological interventions studied for Parkinson's disease psychosis. Before initiating drug therapy for psychosis, possible contribution of antiparkinsonian medications to psychosis must be minimized by reducing their dose and completely switching them to levodopa if indicated. As a group, second- generation antipsychotics have been studied the most f...

Much of the research on visual hallucinations (VHs) has been conducted in the context of eye disease and neurodegenerative conditions, but little is known about these phenomena in psychiatric and nonclinical populations. The purpose of this article is to bring together current knowledge regarding VHs in the psychosis phenotype and contrast this data with the literature drawn from neurodegenerat...

Mounting evidence suggests that individuals with schizophrenia have an underlying vulnerability to cardiovascular disease, and a recent study suggested that this vulnerability might be reflected in the retinal microvasculature. The purpose of this study was to test the hypothesis that the retinal microvessels reflect familial vulnerability to psychotic symptoms. Participants were 531 adolescent...

BACKGROUND The Heschl gyrus and planum temporale have crucial roles in auditory perception and language processing. Our previous investigation using magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) indicated smaller gray matter volumes bilaterally in the Heschl gyrus and in left planum temporale in patients with first-episode schizophrenia but not in patients with first-episode affective psychosis. We sought t...

INTRODUCTION Pituitary enlargement has been reported in individuals with schizophrenic psychosis or an at-risk mental state for psychosis (ARMS). In a previous study, our group could show pituitary volume increase in first episode and ARMS patients with later transition to psychosis (ARMS-T). However, there are no longitudinal studies on this issue so far. We therefore examined longitudinally w...