A UNIGE team shows that overly strong or weak interconnections between certain brain areas could be a predictive marker of the disease. Is it possible to assess an individual's risk of psychosis? Identifying predictive markers is a key challenge in psychiatry . A team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), part of the Synapsy Centre for Neuroscience and Mental Health Research, studied a cohort of patients with a 22q11.
2DS microdeletion—a genetic anomaly linked to psychotic disorders. Scientists found that this population has a unique coupling between the structure and activity of their brain regions, with some areas losing optimal coherence during development, leading to either over- or under-coupling. This specificity paves the way for identifying reliable risk markers.
These findings are published in Biological Psychiatry: Cognitive Neuroscience and Neuroimaging . Microdeletion of the 22q11.2DS gene is the most common genetic deletion.
It affects one person in 2000 and results in the absence of a small DNA sequence on chromosome 22. It can lead to heart defects and immune dysfunction, but also psychotic disorders in adolescence or adulthood in 35% of carriers. At UNIGE, the team led by Stéphan Eliez, a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry and at the Synapsy Centre for Neuroscience and Mental Health Research in the Faculty of Medicine, has been following a cohort of 300 individuals aged between 5 and 34 affected by this microdeletion for twenty years.
Almost 40.