Wednesday, January 05, 2005
Predicting
A team of researchers at Edinburgh University have found some pre-onset signs that could be useful in predicting who's likely to later develop schizophrenia. This would be a big step, since such prediction could allow preemptive treatments to lower the risk and improve disease course. In college, I wrote my term paper for Developmental Psychology on pediatric premorbid predictive factors for schizophrenia, so seeing this research is really interesting to me, but not a surprise.
Back when I was writing, it was fairly clear that there was some way to predict who as at risk even in early childhood. In one study, clinicians watched home videos of kids, and were able to pick out which ones would go on to develop the disease with superb accuracy. This was from pretty much the same behavioral factors this new study examined - blunted affect, asocial behavior, and learning problems. In other studies, abnormal eye movement tracking was predictive of later disease states.
If people are interested, I could post some of that paper here.
Back when I was writing, it was fairly clear that there was some way to predict who as at risk even in early childhood. In one study, clinicians watched home videos of kids, and were able to pick out which ones would go on to develop the disease with superb accuracy. This was from pretty much the same behavioral factors this new study examined - blunted affect, asocial behavior, and learning problems. In other studies, abnormal eye movement tracking was predictive of later disease states.
If people are interested, I could post some of that paper here.
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