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• Posted October 29, 2024

Childhood Attention Issues Show Links to Later Risk for Psychosis, Schizophrenia

Most kids with attention issues won't go on to develop serious psychiatric conditions like psychosis or schizophrenia.

However, a new study finds poor attention spans in childhood, plus certain genes, could play a role in raising the risk for these conditions.

Of course, much more research is needed to pinpoint precursors to psychotic symptoms in a person's teens or 20s, said a team from the University of California, Los Angeles.

Even if children have certain risk factors, that's still not a guarantee of psychiatric illness in adulthood, they stressed.

“If you have this strong liability based on your genetics and early attentional span, we don't know what the longer-term trajectories are and who are the people who are going to be more resilient to their underlying risk,” explained study lead author Dr. Carrie Bearden.

“That's going to be really important to look at when those [better] data become available," said Bearden, a professor at the UCLA Health Semel Institute and the UCLA Health Brain Research Institute.

Her team published its findings Oct. 28 in the journal Nature Mental Health.

The study looked at cognitive, brain and genetic data for more than 10,000 children tracked for an average of six years, from about age 9 into adolescence.

Bearden's team sought to compare rates of attentional issues in childhood, plus certain genetics, against the likelihood of a child experiencing psychosis in adolescence.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, psychosis involves mental states with "some loss of contact with reality. During an episode of psychosis, a person’s thoughts and perceptions are disrupted and they may have difficulty recognizing what is real and what is not."

The new research found that childhood attention-span issues explained anywhere from 4% to 16% of the relationship between genetics and the odds for psychotic symptoms emerging in a child's teens.

According to the UCLA team, experts have long noted the connection between childhood attention issues and later psychosis and schizophrenia.

However, the new data suggests that attention issues aren't the sole cause.

“If attention completely explained the relationship between genetic predisposition and psychotic-like experiences, that percentage would be 100%,” study co-first author Sarah Chang noted in a UCLA Health news release.

“While there are many risk factors for psychosis, the mechanisms through which these risk factors operate, particularly during this developmental risk period for psychosis, are not well understood -- and that's where our paper comes in," said Chang, a neuroscience graduate student at the UCLA Health Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.

According to Bearden, the goal of this research is to pinpoint factors in childhood that might predispose individuals to develop future psychotic disorders and mental illness. Understanding those early signals could lead to new targets for drug therapy, or other interventions that could help prevent illness onset.

The UCLA team are also hoping to amass a list of genes implicated in the development of psychosis -- a "polygenic score."

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

More information

Find out more about psychosis at the National Institute of Mental Health.

SOURCE: UCLA Health, news release, Oct. 28, 2024