Neurocognitive Allied Phenotypes for Schizophrenia and Bipolar Disorder
Journal Title: Schizophrenia Bulletin - Year , Vol 34, Issue 4
Abstract
Psychiatric disorders are genetically complex and represent the end product of multiple biological and social factors. Links between genes and disorder-related abnormalities can be effectively captured via assessment of phenotypes that are both associated with genetic effects and potentially contributory to behavioral abnormalities. Identifying intermediate or allied phenotypes as a strategy for clarifying genetic contributions to disorders has been successful in other areas of medicine and is a promising strategy for identifying susceptibility genes in complex psychiatric disorders. There is growing evidence that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, rather than being wholly distinct disorders, share genetic risk at several loci. Further, there is growing evidence of similarity in the pattern of cognitive and neurobiological deficits in these groups, which may be the result of the effects of these common genetic factors. This review was undertaken to identify patterns of performance on neurocognitive and affective tasks across probands with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder as well as unaffected family members, which warrant further investigation as potential intermediate trait markers. Available evidence indicates that measures of attention regulation, working memory, episodic memory, and emotion processing offer potential for identifying shared and illness-specific allied neurocognitive phenotypes for schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. However, very few studies have evaluated neurocognitive dimensions in bipolar probands or their unaffected relatives, and much work in this area is needed.
Authors and Affiliations
S. Kristian Hill, Margret S. H. Harris, Ellen S. Herbener, Mani Pavuluri, John A. Sweeney
Building a Clinically Relevant Cognitive Task: Case Study of the AX Paradigm
Tasks developed for basic cognitive neuroscience are often ill suited for experimental psychopathology. The development of the expectancy variant of AX continuous performance task to test theories about context processin...
Using Event Related Potentials to Explore Stages of Facial Affect Recognition Deficits in Schizophrenia
Schizophrenia patients show impairments in identifying facial affect; however, it is not known at what stage facial affect processing is impaired. We evaluated 3 event-related potentials (ERPs) to explore stages of facia...
Making Progress in Schizophrenia Research
Social Cognition in Schizophrenia
Social cognition in schizophrenia is a rapidly emerging area of study. Because the number and diversity of studies in this area have increased, efforts have been made to better define terms and provide organizing framewo...
Implementation Considerations for Multisite Clinical Trials with Cognitive Neuroscience Tasks
Multisite clinical trials aimed at cognitive enhancement across various neuropsychiatric conditions have employed standard neuropsychological tests as outcome measures. While these tests have enjoyed wide clinical use an...