Your risk of developing psychotic-like experiences may be influenced by both childhood attention problems and genetic makeup, researchers at UCLA have found.
The findings1 build upon a long-studied association between childhood attention problems and the likelihood of later developing schizophrenia. UCLA researchers led by Dr. Carrie Bearden used data from around 10,000 children over a six-year period to investigate how attentional variability affected the probability of broader psychotic-like symptoms as children entered adolescence.
The team looked at how the youths’ risk for psychotic-like experiences varied based on their attention span and genetic variants that may predispose them to different neuropsychiatric conditions.
Attention Span Issues
The researchers found attention span variability partially acted as an intermediate between the relationships between genetic risk for neuropsychiatric disorders and the expression of psychotic-like symptoms. Attention span issues explained 4-16% of these associations.
If attention totally explained the relationship between genetic predisposition and psychotic-like experiences, that percentage would be 100%, according to the study’s co-first author Sarah Chang, a neuroscience graduate student at the UCLA Health Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior.
Additionally, a higher genetic risk for a broad set of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders was associated with greater severity of psychotic-like experiences and greater attention issues.
“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. Taking a different approach of looking at this large, typically developing youth cohort, we find a really strong association with broad neurodevelopmental risk that was most strongly linked to psychotic symptoms. Attentional variability appears to be a mediator that links genetic liability and those symptoms,”
said Bearden, a professor at the UCLA Health Semel Institute and the UCLA Health Brain Research Institute.
Potential Early Intervention Targets
These experiences raise the risk of future psychotic disorders and mental illness, even though most young people who exhibit psychotic-like symptoms will not go on to develop schizophrenia.
Bearden said the findings help researchers to better understand the relationships from the genomic to behavioral levels during the critical stage of early adolescent development, which may lead to future molecular targets that could be targets for early intervention for psychosis.
The continued evaluation of study participants over time will be critical in determining the most predictive factors of schizophrenia diagnosis and neuropsychiatric outcomes.
“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. That’s going to be really important to look at when those data become available,”
Bearden said.
Neuropsychiatric Condition Genes
The research included cognitive, neurological, and genetic data from over 10,000 individuals in the continuing Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. A national partnership of research organizations, including UCLA Health, is conducting a study on brain development in around 12,000 youths, beginning at age 9 and continuing into early adulthood during the subsequent decade.
One important part of Bearden’s study involved the use of polygenic scores for neuropsychiatric conditions. Unlike some neurological conditions, such as Huntington’s disease, which is caused by alteration to a single gene, there are often hundreds or even thousands of genetic variants associated with psychiatric disorders.
Polygenic scores are used to summarize the combined effect of a large number of genetic variants to estimate a person’s risk for developing the disorder.
Bearden and her team applied polygenic scores for schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental disorders derived from large datasets to the ABCD study participants’ dataset.
A constraint of the already available polygenic scores is their predominant reliance on genetic data from individuals of European descent, hence restricting the application of the study to non-European populations, Bearden stated. Bearden stated that advancements in genetic research conducted globally will address these restrictions.
“In a few years we will have much better polygenic scores. That will be a really huge advance,”
Bearden said.
- Chang, S.E., Hughes, D.E., Zhu, J. et al. Attention-mediated genetic influences on psychotic symptomatology in adolescence. Nat. Mental Health (2024). Doi: 10.1038/s44220-024-00338-7
Image: Nature Mental Health (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s44220-024-00338-7