NEW RESEARCH BY an NUI Galway Professor has found that the risk of of developing schizophrenia may be identified by changes in cognitive ability.

Professor of Psychology Gary Donohue said tell-tale signs found in IQ, memory or social intelligence tests could indicate the onset of the disorders.

He said cognitive deficits often appear before the emergence of clinical symptoms and go on to predict individual levels of disability.

The study, which was funded by Science Foundation Ireland and the Health Research Board, assessed performance on a number of cognitive functions known to be affected in psychosis.

Study

A total of 424 patients participated in the study, including 340 with schizophrenia or schizoaffective disorder and 83 with bipolar or major depressive disorder with psychotic features.

Patients were given individual scores based on their loading for genetic variants interacting with ZNF804A, the first genome wide significant variant to be identified for schizophrenia.

Across patient groups, higher scores on this ZNF804A were associated with poorer performance on multiple cognitive measures, including both general cognitive ability and a measure social cognition, often popularly referred to as social intelligence.

“Understanding how genetic variants contribute to this aspect of disability, both individually and interaction, is an important step towards understanding the underlying biology and developing better and more personalised treatments,” he said.

The research was carried out in association with colleagues from Trinity College, Dublin and has just been published in leading journal, JAMA psychiatry.

Dr. April Hargreaves and Dr. Kristen Nicodemus were joint first authors on the paper.

Performance

Dr. Hargreaves said the fact that they were able to account for a greater proportion of the variance in cognitive performance by looking at multiple variants, suggests that this approach represents an important next step in modeling the genetic complexity of cognition and identifying risk factors for psychosis.

Schizophrenia or bipolar disorder affects about one in 50 Irish adults and it is yet unknown what causes or triggers schizophrenia.

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