Publications by authors named "E Vassos"
Background: Multiple genetic and environmental risk factors play a role in the development of both schizophrenia-spectrum disorders and affective psychoses. How they act in combination is yet to be clarified.
Methods: We analyzed 573 first episode psychosis cases and 1005 controls, of European ancestry.
Background: The association between cannabis and psychosis is established, but the role of underlying genetics is unclear. We used data from the EU-GEI case-control study and UK Biobank to examine the independent and combined effect of heavy cannabis use and schizophrenia polygenic risk score (PRS) on risk for psychosis.
Methods: Genome-wide association study summary statistics from the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium and the Genomic Psychiatry Cohort were used to calculate schizophrenia and cannabis use disorder (CUD) PRS for 1098 participants from the EU-GEI study and 143600 from the UK Biobank.
Article Synopsis
- - The study investigates the link between urban living conditions (urbanicity) and schizotypy, a potential precursor to psychosis, suggesting this relationship varies significantly between North-western and Southern Europe.
- - Researchers assessed 1080 individuals across 14 sites in both regions, measuring urbanicity through local population density and controlling for factors like age and childhood experiences.
- - Findings reveal that higher population density is strongly associated with increased schizotypy in North-western Europe, while the effect is notably weaker in Southern Europe, indicating that urbanization’s impact on mental health is not uniform across different contexts.
Article Synopsis
- The study examined how positive, negative, and disorganized psychotic symptom dimensions relate to different clinical and developmental variables, addressing inconsistencies in definition and prior research.
- Results showed that higher symptom scores were linked to poor social adjustment, earlier onset of symptoms, and specific demographic factors, such as ethnicity and gender.
- The findings also suggested a significant familial influence on disorganized symptoms, highlighting the connections between these symptoms and lower premorbid IQ, especially within monozygotic twin pairs.
Childhood adversity is associated with various clinical dimensions in psychosis; however, how genetic vulnerability shapes the adversity-associated psychopathological signature is yet to be studied. We studied data of 583 First Episode Psychosis (FEP) cases from the EU-GEI FEP case-control study, including Polygenic risk scores for major depressive disorder (MDD-PRS), bipolar disorder (BD-PRS) and schizophrenia (SZ-PRS); childhood adversity measured with the total score of the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire (CTQ); and positive, negative, depressive and manic psychopathological domains from a factor model of transdiagnostic dimensions. Genes and environment interactions were explored as a departure from a multiplicative effect of PRSs and total CTQ on each dimension.
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