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As early detection of symptoms in the subclinical to clinical psychosis spectrum may improve health outcomes, knowing the probabilistic susceptibility of developing a disorder could guide mitigation measures and clinical intervention. In this context, polygenic risk scores (PRSs) quantifying the additive effects of multiple common genetic variants hold the potential to predict complex diseases and index severity gradients. PRSs for schizophrenia (SZ) and bipolar disorder (BD) were computed using Bayesian regression and continuous shrinkage priors based on the latest SZ and BD genome-wide association studies (Psychiatric Genomics Consortium, third release). Eight well-phenotyped groups (n = 1580; 56% males) were assessed: control (n = 305), lower (n = 117) and higher (n = 113) schizotypy (both groups of healthy individuals), at-risk for psychosis (n = 120), BD type-I (n = 359), BD type-II (n = 96), schizoaffective disorder (n = 86), and SZ groups (n = 384). PRS differences were investigated for binary traits and the quantitative Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale. Both BD-PRS and SZ-PRS significantly differentiated controls from at-risk and clinical groups (Nagelkerke’s pseudo-R2: 1.3–7.7%), except for BD type-II for SZ-PRS. Out of 28 pairwise comparisons for SZ-PRS and BD-PRS, 9 and 12, respectively, reached the Bonferroni-corrected significance. BD-PRS differed between control and at-risk groups, but not between at-risk and BD type-I groups. There was no difference between controls and schizotypy. SZ-PRSs, but not BD-PRSs, were positively associated with transdiagnostic symptomology. Overall, PRSs support the continuum model across the psychosis spectrum at the genomic level with possible irregularities for schizotypy. The at-risk state demands heightened clinical attention and research addressing symptom course specifiers. Continued efforts are needed to refine the diagnostic and prognostic accuracy of PRSs in mental healthcare.

Background Between unaffected mental health and diagnosable psychiatric disorders, there is a vast continuum of functioning. The hypothesized link between striatal dopamine signaling and psychosis has guided a prolific body of research. However, it has been understudied in the context of multiple interacting factors, subclinical phenotypes, and pre-postsynaptic dynamics. Method This work investigated psychotic-like experiences and D2/3 dopamine postsynaptic receptor availability in the dorsal striatum, quantified by in vivo [11C]-raclopride positron emission tomography, in a sample of 24 healthy male individuals. Additional mediation and moderation effects with childhood trauma and key dopamine-regulating genes were examined. Results An inverse relationship between nondisplaceable binding potential and subclinical symptoms was identified. D2/3 receptor availability in the left putamen fully mediated the association between traumatic childhood experiences and odd beliefs, that is, inclinations to see meaning in randomness and unfounded interpretations. Moreover, the effect of early adversity was moderated by a DRD2 functional variant (rs1076560). The results link environmental and neurobiological influences in the striatum to the origination of psychosis spectrum symptomology, consistent with the social defeat and diathesis–stress models. Conclusions Adversity exposure may affect the dopamine system as in association with biases in probabilistic reasoning, attributional style, and salience processing. The inverse relationship between D2/3 availability and symptomology may be explained by endogenous dopamine occupying the receptor, postsynaptic compensatory mechanisms, and/or altered receptor sensitivity. This may also reflect a cognitively stabilizing mechanism in non-help-seeking individuals. Future research should comprehensively characterize molecular parameters of dopamine neurotransmission along the psychosis spectrum and according to subtype profiling.

Dopamine is involved in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. Disrupted salience processing by the salience network (SN) may be a central link between dysregulated dopamine function and psychotic symptoms. However, dopaminergic influence on the SN and its presumed influence on psychotic and subpsychotic symptoms or psychotic-like experiences in healthy individuals remain unclear. Therefore, we investigated dopamine-induced changes in functional connectivity of the right anterior insula (rAI), a central SN hub, and their association with psychotic-like experiences. We enrolled 54 healthy, right-handed male subjects in a randomized, double-blind, cross-sectional placebo-controlled experiment. Psychotic-like experiences were assessed using the revised Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire (PAGE-R). They then received either placebo (n = 32) or 200 mg L-DOPA (n = 33), a dopamine precursor, orally and underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging. In a seed-to-voxel approach, we analyzed dopamine-induced changes in functional connectivity of the rAI and assessed the relationship between functional connectivity changes and PAGE-R score. L-DOPA reduced functional connectivity between the rAI and the left auditory cortex planum polare. In the placebo group, we found a strong negative correlation between PAGE-R score and rAI to planum polare functional connectivity; in the L-DOPA group, there was a strong positive correlation between PAGE-R score and functional connectivity between rAI and planum polare. The PAGE-R score explained about 30% of the functional connectivity variation between rAI and planum polare in the two groups. Our findings suggest that psychotic-like experiences are associated with dopamine-induced disruption of auditory input to the SN, which may lead to aberrant attribution of salience.

International audience; Functional magnetic resonance imaging provides rich spatio-temporal data of human brain activity during task and rest. Many recent efforts have focussed on characterising dynamics of brain activity. One notable instance is co-activation pattern (CAP) analysis, a frame-wise analytical approach that disentangles the different functional brain networks interacting with a user-defined seed region. While promising applications in various clinical settings have been demonstrated, there is not yet any centralised, publicly accessible resource to facilitate the deployment of the technique. Here, we release a working version of TbCAPs, a new toolbox for CAP analysis, which includes all steps of the analytical pipeline, introduces new methodological developments that build on already existing concepts, and enables a facilitated inspection of CAPs and resulting metrics of brain dynamics. The toolbox is available on a public academic repository at https://c4science.ch/source/CAP_Toolbox.git. In addition, to illustrate the feasibility and usefulness of our pipeline, we describe an application to the study of human cognition. CAPs are constructed from resting-state fMRI using as seed the right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and, in a separate sample, we successfully predict a behavioural measure of continuous attentional performance from the metrics of CAP dynamics (R ​= ​0.59).

The dopamine hypothesis of schizophrenia implies that alterations in the dopamine system cause functional abnormalities in the brain that may converge to aberrant salience attribution and eventually lead to psychosis. Indeed, widespread brain disconnectivity across the psychotic spectrum has been revealed by resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI). However, the dopaminergic involvement in intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) and its putative relationship to the development of psychotic spectrum disorders remains partly unclear-in particular at the low-end of the psychosis continuum. Therefore, we investigated dopamine-induced changes in striatal iFC and their modulation by psychometrically assessed schizotypy. Our randomized, double-blind placebo-controlled study design included 54 healthy, right-handed male participants. Each participant was assessed with the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) and underwent 10 minutes of rs-fMRI scanning. Participants then received either a placebo or 200 mg of L-DOPA, a dopamine precursor. We analyzed iFC of 6 striatal seeds that are known to evoke modulation of dopamine-related networks. The main effect of L-DOPA was a significant functional decoupling from the right ventral caudate to both occipital fusiform gyri. This dopamine-induced decoupling emerged primarily in participants with low SPQ scores, while participants with high positive SPQ scores showed decoupling indifferently of the L-DOPA challenge. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that schizotypal traits may be the result of dopamine-induced striato-occipital decoupling.

We present Cardinal, a tool for computer-assisted authoring of movie scripts. Cardinal provides a means of viewing a script through a variety of perspectives, for interpretation as well as editing. This is made possible by virtue of intelligent automated analysis of natural language scripts and generating different intermediate representations. Cardinal generates 2-D and 3-D visualizations of the scripted narrative and also presents interactions in a timeline-based view. The visualizations empower the scriptwriter to understand their story from a spatial perspective, and the timeline view provides an overview of the interactions in the story. The user study reveals that users of the system demonstrated confidence and comfort using the system.

Reduction in hippocampal volume is a hallmark of schizophrenia and already present in the clinical high-risk state. Nevertheless, other subcortical structures, such as the thalamus, amygdala and pallidum can differentiate schizophrenia patients from controls. We studied the role of hippocampal and subcortical structures in clinical high-risk individuals from two cohorts. High-resolution T1-weighted structural MRI brain scans of a total of 91 clinical high-risk individuals and 64 healthy controls were collected in two centers. The bilateral volume of the hippocampus, the thalamus, the caudate, the putamen, the pallidum, the amygdala, and the accumbens were automatically segmented using FSL-FIRST. A linear mixed-effects model and a prospective meta-analysis were applied to assess group-related volumetric differences. We report reduced hippocampal and thalamic volumes in clinical high-risk individuals compared to healthy controls. No volumetric alterations were detected for the caudate, the putamen, the pallidum, the amygdala, or the accumbens. Moreover, we found comparable medium effect sizes for group-related comparison of the thalamus in the two analytical methods. These findings underline the relevance of specific alterations in the hippocampal and subcortical volumes in the high-risk state. Further analyses may allow hippocampal and thalamic volumes to be used as biomarkers to predict psychosis.

Synesthesia is a perceptual phenomenon in which stimuli in one particular modality elicit a sensation within the same or another sensory modality (e.g., specific graphemes evoke the perception of particular colors). Grapheme-color synesthesia (GCS) has been proposed to arise from abnormal local cross-activation between grapheme and color areas because of their hyperconnectivity. Recently published studies did not confirm such a hyperconnectivity, although morphometric alterations were found in occipitotemporal, parietal, and frontal regions of synesthetes. We used magnetic resonance imaging surface-based morphometry and graph-theoretical network analyses to investigate the topology of structural brain networks in 24 synesthetes and 24 nonsynesthetes. Connectivity matrices were derived from region-wise cortical thickness correlations of 2366 different cortical parcellations across the whole cortex and from 154 more common brain divisions as well. Compared with nonsynesthetes, synesthetes revealed a globally altered structural network topology as reflected by reduced small-worldness, increased clustering, increased degree, and decreased betweenness centrality. Connectivity of the fusiform gyrus (FuG) and intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was changed as well. Hierarchical modularity analysis revealed increased intramodular and intermodular connectivity of the IPS in GCS. However, connectivity differences in the FuG and IPS showed a low specificity because of global changes. We provide first evidence that GCS is rooted in a reduced small-world network organization that is driven by increased clustering suggesting global hyperconnectivity within the synesthetes' brain. Connectivity alterations were widespread and not restricted to the FuG and IPS. Therefore, synesthetic experience might be only one phenotypic manifestation of the globally altered network architecture in GCS.

BackgroundThe attenuated positive symptoms syndrome (APSS) is considered an at-risk indicator for psychosis. However, the characteristics and developmental aspects of the combined or enriched risk criteria of APSS and basic symptom (BS) criteria, including self-experienced cognitive disturbances (COGDIS) remain under-researched.MethodBased on the Structured Interview of Prodromal Syndromes (SIPS), the prevalence of APSS in 13- to 35-year-old individuals seeking help in an early recognition program for schizophrenia and bipolar-spectrum disorders was examined. BS criteria and COGDIS were rated using the Schizophrenia Proneness Instrument for Adults/Children and Youth. Participants meeting APSS criteria were compared with participants meeting only BS criteria across multiple characteristics. Co-occurrence (APSS+/BS+, APSS+/COGDIS+) was compared across 13–17, 18–22 and 23–35 years age groups.ResultsOf 175 individuals (age = 20.6 ± 5.8, female = 38.3%), 94 (53.7%) met APSS criteria. Compared to BS, APSS status was associated with suicidality, higher illness severity, lower functioning, higher SIPS positive, negative, disorganized and general symptoms scores, depression scores and younger age (18.3 ± 5.0 v. 23.2 ± 5.6 years, p < 0.0001) with age-related differences in the prevalence of APSS (ranging from 80.3% in 13- to 17-year-olds to 33.3% in 23- to 35-year-olds (odds ratio 0.21, 95% confidence interval 0.11–0.37). Within APSS+ individuals, fewer adolescents fulfilled combined risk criteria of APSS+/BS+ or APSS+/COGDIS+ compared to the older age groups.ConclusionsAPSS status was associated with greater suicidality and illness/psychophathology severity in this help-seeking cohort, emphasizing the need for clinical care. The age-related differences in the prevalence of APSS and the increasing proportion of APSS+/COGDIS+ may point to a higher proportion of non-specific/transient, rather than risk-specific attenuated positive symptoms in adolescents.

IntroductionAccording to the dopamine hypothesis functional brain abnormalities and neurochemical alterations may converge to cause psychosis through aberrant salience attribution. Indeed, resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) has revealed widespread brain disconnectivity across the psychotic spectrum.ObjectivesTo advance the understanding of the dopaminergic involvement in intrinsic functional connectivity (iFC) and its putative relationship to the development of psychotic disorders we aimed to investigate the link between L-Dopa, a dopamine precursor, and its modulation of striatal iFC in subthreshold psychosis, i.e. non-clinical psychosis.MethodsWe used a randomized, double-blind placebo controlled study design including in our sample 56 healthy, male, right-handed, subjects with no familiar risk factors for psychosis who were assessed with the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ) and underwent 10 minutes of rs-fMRI scanning. All subjects received either 250 mg of Madopar DR®(200 mg L-Dopa plus 50 mg benserazid, dual release form) or a placebo. We analysed resting-state iFC of 6 striatal seeds, known to evoke dopamine related networks.ResultsThe main effect of L-Dopa presented itself (FWE-corrected) as a significant decrease in iFC from the right ventral striatum to the cerebellum and the precuneus cortex, and an increase in iFC to the occipital cortex. Subjects with high SPQ positive symptom sub-scores showed a significant increase of L-Dopa induced connectivity.ConclusionWe identified striatal functional connectivity being modulated by augmented dopamine availability, and in support of the dopamine hypothesis, we found that those iFC patterns are associated to high scores of psychotic like experiences.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.