Publications by authors named "Assen Jablensky"

Article Synopsis
  • Structural neuroimaging studies reveal both common and disorder-specific gray matter deficits across various psychiatric conditions.
  • Large-scale data pooling helps identify potential neuroanatomical factors linked to mental illness vulnerability, although data-sharing faces significant challenges.
  • Using a federated analysis across eight research sites, the study found overlapping gray matter patterns in schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, and autism spectrum disorder, suggesting shared cortical and subcortical vulnerabilities.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Bipolar disorder (BD) is a heritable mental illness with complex etiology. While the largest published genome-wide association study identified 64 BD risk loci, the causal SNPs and genes within these loci remain unknown. We applied a suite of statistical and functional fine-mapping methods to these loci, and prioritized 17 likely causal SNPs for BD.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study explores the structural brain differences in individuals with schizophrenia compared to healthy controls, focusing on various brain metrics like cortical thickness and subcortical volume using a large international dataset.
  • Results show that people with schizophrenia have greater variability in brain structure, particularly in the frontotemporal regions, suggesting distinct subtypes of the disorder may exist.
  • The findings highlight the significance of understanding brain structure variability to improve knowledge of schizophrenia and help identify potential biomarkers for the illness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * Researchers discovered 287 genomic regions associated with schizophrenia, emphasizing genes specifically active in excitatory and inhibitory neurons, and identified 120 key genes potentially responsible for these associations.
  • * The findings highlight important biological processes related to neuronal function, suggesting overlaps between common and rare genetic variants in both schizophrenia and neurodevelopmental disorders, ultimately aiding future research on these conditions.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Trajectory analysis has been used to study long-term offending patterns and identify offender subgroups, but few such studies have included people with psychotic disorders (PDs) and these have been restricted to adult offenders.

Aims: To compare offending trajectories among 10-26-year-olds with PDs with those with other mental disorders (OMDs) or none (NMD) and identify associated risk factors.

Methods: This is a record-linkage study of 184,147 people born in Western Australia (WA) 1983-1991, drawing on data from WA mental health information system, WA corrective services and other state-wide registers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • Bipolar disorder has a genetic basis and complex causes; a large study compared nearly 42,000 bipolar patients with over 371,000 healthy controls, revealing 64 genomic regions linked to the disorder.
  • The findings showed that risk-related genes are heavily associated with brain functions, particularly in areas like the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus, and they include targets for various medications.
  • The research also distinguished between bipolar disorder types I and II, revealing a close genetic relationship and highlighting 15 specific genes that could lead to new treatment options and further investigations.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: Cognitive impairment is a key feature of psychiatric illness, making cognition an important tool for exploring of the genetics of illness risk. It remains unclear which measures should be prioritized in pleiotropy-guided research. Here, we generate profiles of genetic overlap between psychotic and affective disorders and cognitive measures in Caucasian and Hispanic groups.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: There is a dearth of longitudinal data on outcomes in prevalent cases of psychotic illness across a range of ages and levels of chronicity. Our aim was to describe changes over time in mental and physical health outcomes, as well as patterns of service utilisation that may have influenced outcomes, in a representative prevalence sample of 641 Western Australians with a psychotic illness who, at Wave 1, were part of the National Survey of High Impact Psychosis.

Methods: In Wave 1 (2010, 2012), a two-phase design was employed to ensure representativeness: Phase 1 psychosis screening took place in public mental health and non-government organisation services, while, in Phase 2, a randomised sample was interviewed.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The present study reports preliminary results from the multicentre project on the approbation of the Russian language version of the "The Communication Checklist-Self Report" (RL-CC-SR) and its first use in schizophrenia (SZ), aiming to evaluate the contribution of language disturbances in the pathogenesis of this heterogeneous disorder.

Subjects And Methods: The study evaluated patients' clinical state with the Diagnostic Interview for Psychoses (DIP), and assessed language and communication disturbances (LCD) with the RL-CC-SR in all participants (213 healthy controls (HC), 83 SZ patients, 31 SZ first-degree relatives). Data from the current sample of SZ (n=50), and HC (n=213) was analysed to calculate the relationships between LCD, social and clinical variables using descriptive statistics methods, T-test and Pearson's correlations (SPSS-26, 2019).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • * A systematic review involved ten studies with nearly 19,000 participants, concluding that the burden of CNVs does not correlate with general cognitive performance.
  • * However, specific schizophrenia-associated CNVs were linked to poorer verbal recall and perceptual reasoning abilities in individuals with psychotic disorders and their relatives, suggesting they may serve as biomarkers for cognitive impairment and increased disease risk.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Introduction: Children of mothers with severe mental illness are at increased risk of premature death including in infancy and early childhood. Importantly, these children are also more likely to be exposed to adverse socio-demographic risk factors and serious obstetric complications which, of themselves, may increase risk for childhood mortality. We examined mortality outcome at different ages up to 5 years taking account of these risks.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF
Article Synopsis
  • The study aims to analyze genetic variations linked to schizophrenia using the Australian Schizophrenia Research Bank cohort, focusing on specific genes and pathways.
  • Researchers conducted a genome-wide association study with 429 schizophrenia samples and 255 controls, examining the impact of single-nucleotide polymorphisms on gene expression and regulatory functions.
  • The key finding involves a significant association with the gene frizzled class receptor 1, suggesting that the Wnt signaling pathway may play a critical role in schizophrenia and could be targeted for future therapies.
View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: The interplay between genetic and environmental factors on risk for psychotic illness remains poorly understood. The aim of this study was to estimate independent and combined effects of familial liability for schizophrenia and exposure to obstetric complications on risk for developing psychotic illness, covarying with exposure to other environmental stressors.

Methods: This whole-population birth cohort study used record linkage across Western Australian statewide data collections (midwives, psychiatric, hospital admissions, child protection, mortality) to identify liveborn offspring ( = 1046) born 1980-1995 to mothers with schizophrenia, comparing them to offspring of mothers with no recorded psychiatric history ( = 298,370).

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Purpose: To examine the impact of substance use and other risk factors on conviction rates in people with a psychotic illness (PI) and other mental disorders (OMD) compared to those with no mental illness (NMI).

Methods: This research is part of a longitudinal record-linked whole-population study of 467,945 children born in Western Australia (WA) between 1980 and 2001. This cohort was identified through linkages between the WA psychiatric case register, WA corrective services data and other state-wide registers.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Following approval of the ICD-11 by the World Health Assembly in May 2019, World Health Organization (WHO) member states will transition from the ICD-10 to the ICD-11, with reporting of health statistics based on the new system to begin on January 1, 2022. The WHO Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse will publish Clinical Descriptions and Diagnostic Guidelines (CDDG) for ICD-11 Mental, Behavioural and Neurodevelopmental Disorders following ICD-11's approval. The development of the ICD-11 CDDG over the past decade, based on the principles of clinical utility and global applicability, has been the most broadly international, multilingual, multidisciplinary and participative revision process ever implemented for a classification of mental disorders.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

The FOXP2 gene is hypothesised to be involved in schizophrenia by affecting speech and language development. Associations between common single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in FOXP2 and language have been inconsistent. We tested five previously associated SNPs for association with language in the Western Australian Family Study of Schizophrenia (n = 709, including n = 333 with schizophrenia/spectrum disorder) and found no significant associations.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Congenital/early blindness is reportedly protective against schizophrenia. Using a whole-population cohort of 467,945 children born in Western Australia between 1980 and 2001, we examined prevalence of schizophrenia and psychotic illness in individuals with congenital/early blindness. Overall, 1870 children developed schizophrenia (0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Objective: Children of mothers with severe mental illness are at significantly increased risk of developing intellectual disability. Obstetric complications are also implicated in the risk for intellectual disability. Moreover, children of mothers with severe mental illness are more likely to be exposed to obstetric complications.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: There is increasing evidence for shared genetic susceptibility between schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Although genetic variants only convey subtle increases in risk individually, their combination into a polygenic risk score constitutes a strong disease predictor.AimsTo investigate whether schizophrenia and bipolar disorder polygenic risk scores can distinguish people with broadly defined psychosis and their unaffected relatives from controls.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Background: The profile of cortical neuroanatomical abnormalities in schizophrenia is not fully understood, despite hundreds of published structural brain imaging studies. This study presents the first meta-analysis of cortical thickness and surface area abnormalities in schizophrenia conducted by the ENIGMA (Enhancing Neuro Imaging Genetics through Meta Analysis) Schizophrenia Working Group.

Methods: The study included data from 4474 individuals with schizophrenia (mean age, 32.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

As it is likely that both common and rare genetic variation are important for complex disease risk, studies that examine the full range of the allelic frequency distribution should be utilized to dissect the genetic influences on mental illness. The rate limiting factor for inferring an association between a variant and a phenotype is inevitably the total number of copies of the minor allele captured in the studied sample. For rare variation, with minor allele frequencies of 0.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

Elucidating schizotypal traits is important if we are to understand the various manifestations of psychosis spectrum liability and to reliably identify individuals at high risk for psychosis. The present study examined the network structures of (1) 9 schizotypal personality domains and (2) 74 individual schizotypal items, and (3) explored whether networks differed across gender and culture (North America vs China). The study was conducted in a sample of 27001 participants from 12 countries and 21 sites (M age = 22.

View Article and Find Full Text PDF

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: fopen(/var/lib/php/sessions/ci_session84c4uo4a7v1vd0l96ogp80lgpsetpp0m): Failed to open stream: No space left on device

Filename: drivers/Session_files_driver.php

Line Number: 177

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once

A PHP Error was encountered

Severity: Warning

Message: session_start(): Failed to read session data: user (path: /var/lib/php/sessions)

Filename: Session/Session.php

Line Number: 137

Backtrace:

File: /var/www/html/index.php
Line: 316
Function: require_once