Adelaide mental health researchers have made a promising breakthrough in the early detection of the risk of psychosis, with the eventual hope that patients could be given appropriate treatments earlier to prevent psychotic episodes from occurring.
Published in the Nature journal Translational Psychiatry, a new probability model developed by researchers in the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Psychiatry has shown 70% accuracy in predicting patients who are at greatest risk of having their first psychotic episode within 12 months, compared with the 28% accuracy of the current criteria for those who are at “ultra-high risk”.
The new model combines medical history, the latest bedside clinical assessment, and biomarkers of fatty acids to determine a patient’s risk of psychosis. In this preliminary study, the researchers used data from 40 European patients.
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