Childhood attention issues may signal psychosis risk later

Children suffering attention problems may be at risk of developing psychotic-like experiences in adulthood, finds a study on Monday.

Psychosis is a mental condition that causes a person to lose touch with reality.

According to researchers from the University of California - Los Angeles, who analysed data from about 10,000 children for over six years, besides genetic makeup, attentional variability influenced the risk of broader psychotic-like symptoms as children grow into adolescence.

Children with a higher genetic risk for a broad set of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders had a greater risk of severe psychotic-like experiences and greater attention issues.

In addition, 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 per cent of these associations, revealed the findings, published in Nature Mental Health.

"If attention completely explained the relationship between genetic predisposition and psychotic-like experiences, that percentage would be 100 per cent," said Sarah Chang, a neuroscience graduate student at UCLA.

The researchers noted that the majority of youth who experience psychotic-like symptoms will not go on to develop schizophrenia. These events raise the chance of a future psychotic disorder and mental illness.

The study findings, based on cognitive, brain, and genetic data from more than 10,000 participants, may help lead to future molecular targets that could be targets for early intervention for psychosis.

The study also involved the use of polygenic scores for neuropsychiatric conditions. These scores summarise the combined effect of a large number of genetic variants to estimate a person's risk for developing the disorder. However, a limitation of using the polygenic scores is that they mostly rely on genetic data from people with European ancestry.

(With inputs from IANS)