Growth Charts May Help Diagnose Children at Risk for Psychosis

In a recent study published in JAMA Psychiatry, researchers at Penn Medicine found that by charting the cognitive development of young children who are at risk for psychosis, parents, educators, and clinicians can aid in the early detection of their symptoms before their disease progresses. Psychosis is a severe mental illness, characterized by hallucinations, delusions, social withdrawal and a loss of contact with reality. Researchers assessed brain behavior by administering a structured psychiatric evaluation to 10,000 patients between the ages of eight and 21 from November 2009 to November 2011. The research team also administered neurocognitive tests to evaluate each child’s brain development across five or more categories — including executive function, abstraction and mental flexibility, attention and working memory, complex cognition, and social cognition. The results were then analyzed to predict the chronological age for each child. Those with the most extreme psychotic symptoms had a lower chronological age than predicted and also had a greater developmental lag, most pronounced in complex cognition and social cognition. To read more about this study, click here.