Structural brain correlates of an operationally defined high-risk phenotype for schizophrenia: a population based study

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Schizophrenia is THE major psychiatric disorder and it affects around 1% of the population in their lifetime with devastating effects. Key ?psychotic? symptoms include hallucinations, and delusions as well as problems with emotions, motivation and intellect. It has recently been shown that many people have similar symptoms but only a few go on to develop the full-blown illness. Studying people with symptoms alone who are ?at risk? of schizophrenia is likely to teach us a lot about what it is that causes the illness. One way of doing this is to make use of a large survey of the population known as the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC). This has been following several thousand people born in Avon to see what health problems they might develop. The people in ALSPAC are now about 17 years old and are being studied to see which of them has these psychotic-like symptoms. We propose to build on this work by selecting a representative group of those with and those without symptoms and asking them to have an MRI scan. MRI is a commonly used and very safe brain scanning technique. It shows up the detailed structured of the brain, both grey and white matter. Statistical techniques can then be applied which will pick out any areas that are different between the two groups. We predict that certain areas will be abnormal and if so this will greatly increase our understanding of the illness and may even lead to new treatments or ways of preventing the clinical disorder manifesting itself.