Childhood Attention Deficit Disorders and Genetics Associated with Risk for Psychosis – Neuroscience News

Summary: Childhood care issues, as well as genetics, increase the likelihood of developing psychotic symptoms in adolescence. By analyzing data from 10,000 young people, researchers found that differences in attention spans explain little of how genetic risk factors translate into psychotic-like symptoms.

These findings may pave the way for early intervention strategies targeting at-risk youth. The research also highlights limitations in polygenic data due to limited variation, highlighting the need for extensive genetic studies. Understanding these relationships during the critical teenage years can help predict whether a person will be resilient or at risk for mental illness later in life.

Important information:

• Genetic factors and attention span disorders in childhood are associated with psychotic symptoms in adolescence.
• Attention span accounts for 16% of the association between genetic risk and psychotic symptoms.
• The polygenic data used in the study has a limited range, mainly applicable to people of European descent.

Source: UCLA

UCLA Health researchers have found that a person’s risk of having psychotic-like experiences can be influenced by both childhood care problems and their genetic makeup.

Studies, published in Nature Mental Healthbuild on the long-studied relationship between childhood attention problems and the likelihood of later developing schizophrenia.

Using data from nearly 10,000 children over six years, UCLA researchers led by Dr. Carrie Bearden wanted to find out if the difference in attention influenced the risk of many symptoms such as psychosis as the children grew into adolescence.

Specifically, the team looked at how young people’s risk of having psychotic-like experiences varies based on their attention span and different genetic factors that may predispose them to different neuropsychiatric conditions. .

The researchers found:

• High genetic risk for a wide range of mental and psychiatric disorders was associated with greater severity of emotional like experiences and severe care issues.
• Furthermore, differences in attention span served as a mediator of the relationship between genetic risk for neuropsychiatric disorders and the expression of psychotic-like symptoms. Maintenance time issues explained 4-16% of these associations.

“If attention fully explained the relationship between genetics and psychotic-like experiences, that percentage would be 100%,” said the study’s first author Sarah Chang, a neuroscience student at hearing at the UCLA Health Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

“While there are many risk factors for psychosis, the mechanisms by which these risk factors operate, particularly during this risk period for the development of psychosis, are not well understood – and that is where our paper come in.”

“We’ve known for a long time that attention problems are one of the earliest precursors of psychosis,” said Bearden, a professor at the UCLA Health Semalt Institute and the UCLA Health Brain Research Institute.

“When we took a different approach to looking at this large, growing cohort of young adults, we found a very strong association with broader neurodevelopmental risk that was significantly associated with cognitive symptoms. Attentional fluctuations it appears to be a mediator that links genetic responsibility to those symptoms.”

Although the majority of young people with psychotic symptoms will not go on to develop schizophrenia, these events increase the chances of developing mental health problems and mental illnesses in the future.

Bearden says the findings help researchers better understand genomic-to-behavioral connections during the critical developmental stage of adolescence, which could lead to future molecular targets that could ‘ which are early intervention targets for psychosis.

Continued assessment of study participants over time will be important to help determine predictors of schizophrenia diagnosis and neuropsychiatric outcomes.

“If you have this strong genetic predisposition and early attention span, we don’t know what the long-term pathways are and which people are going to be able to withstand their risk.” in the main,” said Bearden.

“That will be very important to look at when that data is available.”

The study used cognitive, brain and genetic data from more than 10,000 participants in the ongoing Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. The study, led by a national consortium of research institutions including UCLA Health, examines the brain development of nearly 12,000 young people starting at age 9 and followed for the next decade. grown ups.

An important part of Bearden’s study involved the use of polygenic data for neuropsychiatric conditions. Unlike other neurological conditions such as Huntington’s disease which are caused by a single gene mutation, there are often hundreds or even thousands of different genetic variants associated with mental illnesses.

Polygenic factors are used to summarize the combined effect of a large number of genetic variants to estimate an individual’s risk of developing a disorder.

Bearden and his team used polygenic data for schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental disorders derived from large existing datasets and applied them to a dataset from participants in the ABCD study.

A limitation of using currently available polygenic data is that they rely heavily on genetic information from people with European ancestry, which limits the applicability of the study to non-European people, Bearden said. he said. Advances in genetic studies in other parts of the world will help correct these deficiencies, Bearden said.

“In a few years we will have better polygenic data. That will be a huge advance,” Bearden said.

Regarding these genetic and psychological research issues

Author: Is Houston
Source: UCLA
Contact: Will Houston – UCLA
Image: Image credited to Neuroscience News

Basic research: Road closed.
“Genetic influences on psychotic symptoms in adolescence” by Carrie Bearden et al. Nature Mental Health

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Summary

The influence of attentional genetics on psychotic symptomatology in adolescence

Attention deficit disorder is one of the primary causes of schizophrenia. In this longitudinal cohort study, we examine the relationships between cognitive and neuropsychiatric polygenic scores (PGSs), psychosis-spectrum symptoms and attention-related phenotypes in adolescence (ABCD; n= 11,855; mean baseline age 9.93 ± 0.6).

Across three two-year follow-ups, significant differences in attention and altered functional coordination were associated with greater severity of psychotic-like experiences (PLEs). In youth of European descent, neuropsychiatric and cognitive PGS were associated with greater severity of PLE (R²= 0.026–0.035) and a significant difference in attention (R²= 0.100–0.109).

Specifically, the effect of broad neurodevelopmental PGS on PLEs weakened over time, whereas schizophrenia PGS did not. A significant difference in the relationship between most PGSs and PLEs, explaining 4-16% of these associations.

Finally, PGSs encoded by developmental coexpression modules were significantly associated with PLE severity, although the effect size was larger for genome-wide PGSs.

Findings implicate a broad neurodevelopmental role in the pathophysiology of psychosis-spectrum symptomatology in adolescence; differences in care may relate to different types of risk and symptoms.