Abstract

Early detection of elevated psychosis risk and early intervention are key goals in the treatment of psychotic disorders. Given the peak onset age of psychotic disorders in early adulthood, detection and preventive interventions should ideally occur earlier in life, particularly for neurodevelopmental disorders such as psychotic disorders.

In a recent nationwide Finnish study, we found that adolescents in specialist psychiatry services have a significantly high risk of developing psychosis. Of them, 15% were diagnosed with a psychotic or bipolar disorder by age 28. Even more strikingly, we found that of all first psychosis and bipolar disorder cases in the population, as many as 47% occurred among individuals who had attended adolescent psychiatry services. This suggests enormous untapped potential to predict psychotic disorders within this patient group. The next key step towards effective psychosis prediction among adolescent psychiatry patients is to find ways to identify individuals who have particularly high psychosis risk later in life.

In the talk I will describe a register-based study where we focused on Finnish adolescents attending psychiatric services (N=26,195) and looked at a range of clinical and socio-demographic factors as predictors of psychotic disorders in adulthood. I will also discuss other related studies that the team at the University of Edinburgh has been working on.