Publications by authors named "Velthorst E"

Background: The Lovisenberg Diakonal Hospital recently introduced an Open-Door Policy in their (formerly) closed psychiatric admission wards for people with a forced admission to an acute psychiatric crisis. Their modern mental health care system is remarkably similar to the Dutch healthcare organization, with shared values and standards, and provides good grounds for an implementation of an Open-Doors Policy in the Netherlands.

Aim: Gaining inspiration to reduce seclusion and create a new quality development and assessment process for closed admission departments in the Dutch mental health care system.

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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.

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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.

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Background: Cannabis use and familial vulnerability to psychosis have been associated with social cognition deficits. This study examined the potential relationship between cannabis use and cognitive biases underlying social cognition and functioning in patients with first episode psychosis (FEP), their siblings, and controls.

Methods: We analyzed a sample of 543 participants with FEP, 203 siblings, and 1168 controls from the EU-GEI study using a correlational design.

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The relationship between reduced social connectedness and mental health outcomes is increasingly acknowledged. Yet, relatively little is known about how two crucial subjective aspects of social disconnectedness - loneliness and social relationship dissatisfaction (SRD) - are related to clinical and functional recovery. This cohort study aimed to investigate the associations of loneliness and SRD with various mental health outcomes among 15,512 outpatients from a Dutch mental health service.

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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.
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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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Social isolation has been linked to a range of psychiatric issues, but the behavioral component that drives it is not well understood. Here, a genome-wide associations study (GWAS) was carried out to identify genetic variants that contribute specifically to social isolation behavior (SIB) in up to 449,609 participants from the UK Biobank. 17 loci were identified at genome-wide significance, contributing to a 4% SNP-based heritability estimate.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates the relationship between setting-level deprivation and cannabis use in affecting the incidence of first-episode psychotic disorders (FEP).
  • Researchers used data from 14 settings in the EU-GEI study to analyze how factors like owner-occupancy and daily cannabis use correlate with FEP incidence among individuals aged 18-64.
  • Findings revealed that lower owner-occupancy rates were linked to higher rates of psychosis, while daily cannabis use was specifically associated with affective psychoses, suggesting environmental factors play a significant role in psychotic disorder incidence.
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Background: We examined whether cannabis use contributes to the increased risk of psychotic disorder for non-western minorities in Europe.

Methods: We used data from the EU-GEI study (collected at sites in Spain, Italy, France, the United Kingdom, and the Netherlands) on 825 first-episode patients and 1026 controls. We estimated the odds ratio (OR) of psychotic disorder for several groups of migrants compared with the local reference population, without and with adjustment for measures of cannabis use.

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Racial disparities in prescriptions of anti-psychotics have been highlighted before. However, (i) the evidence on other medications, including anti-depressant or mood stabilizing medications is lacking, and (ii) the role of potentially confounding factors and (iii) specificity of such disparities to schizophrenia (SCZ), are still unknown. We used electronic health records (EHRs) from 224,212 adults to estimate the odds ratios of receiving a prescription for different nervous system medications among patients with SCZ of different race/ethnicity, and analogous linear models to investigate differences in prescribed medication doses.

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Article Synopsis
  • - The study investigates the variation of subclinical psychosis (SP) measures, such as schizotypy and psychotic-like experiences (PLEs), across different geographic regions and how this correlates with the incidence of first-episode psychosis (FEP) in those areas.
  • - Through analysis of data from 1497 controls in 16 sites across 6 countries, researchers found that schizotypy showed significant variation related to site characteristics, while PLEs exhibited less variation; local incidences of FEP were associated with reduced unexplained variance in schizotypy.
  • - Findings highlight that younger, migrant, unmarried, unemployed, and less educated individuals, along with factors like cannabis use and childhood adversity, are linked to SP
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Background: Psychotic experiences (PEs) and social isolation (SI) seem related during early stages of psychosis, but the temporal dynamics between the two are not clear. Literature so far suggests a self-perpetuating cycle wherein momentary increases in PEs lead to social withdrawal, which, subsequently, triggers PEs at a next point in time, especially when SI is associated with increased distress. The current study investigated the daily-life temporal associations between SI and PEs, as well as the role of SI-related and general affective distress in individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis.

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Background: Childhood adversity and cannabis use are considered independent risk factors for psychosis, but whether different patterns of cannabis use may be acting as mediator between adversity and psychotic disorders has not yet been explored. The aim of this study is to examine whether cannabis use mediates the relationship between childhood adversity and psychosis.

Methods: Data were utilised on 881 first-episode psychosis patients and 1231 controls from the European network of national schizophrenia networks studying Gene-Environment Interactions (EU-GEI) study.

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Purpose: While severely distressing events are known to affect mental health adversely, some survivors develop only short-lived or no psychiatric symptoms in the aftermath of a disaster. In the WTC Health Program General Responder Cohort (WTCHP GRC) we examined whether social support was protective against the development of depression or anxiety symptoms after the 9/11 WTC attacks and explored in a subsample whether trait resilience moderated this relationship.

Methods: We analyzed data from 14,033 traditional and 13,478 non-traditional responders who attended at least three periodic health monitoring visits between 2002 and 2019.

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In many individuals with a diagnosis of schizophrenia social functioning is impaired across the lifespan. Social cognition has emerged as one of the possible factors that may contribute to these challenges. Neuroimaging research can give further insights into the underlying mechanisms of social (cognitive) difficulties.

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Background: Schizophrenia (SZ) and autism spectrum disorders (ASD) are characterized by difficulties in theory of mind (ToM). We examined group differences in performance on a ToM-related test and associations with an estimated IQ.

Methods: Participants [ = 1227, SZ ( = 563), ASD ( = 159), and controls ( = 505), 32.

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Article Synopsis
  • Illegal stimulant use is linked to a higher risk of first-episode psychosis (FEP), with 14.5% of patients experiencing FEP reporting lifetime stimulant use compared to 10.8% of controls.
  • The study analyzed 1,130 FEP patients and 1,497 controls across Europe and Brazil, using logistic regression to determine the relationship between stimulant use and FEP risk.
  • Findings suggest that eliminating stimulant use could potentially prevent 3.35% to 7.61% of FEP cases, indicating a significant public health concern that varies by country.
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This study investigated if the association between childhood maltreatment and cognition among psychosis patients and community controls was partially accounted for by genetic liability for psychosis. Patients with first-episode psychosis (N = 755) and unaffected controls (N = 1219) from the EU-GEI study were assessed for childhood maltreatment, intelligence quotient (IQ), family history of psychosis (FH), and polygenic risk score for schizophrenia (SZ-PRS). Controlling for FH and SZ-PRS did not attenuate the association between childhood maltreatment and IQ in cases or controls.

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Background: A history of childhood adversity is associated with psychotic disorder, with an increase in risk according to the number of exposures. However, it is not known why only some exposed individuals go on to develop psychosis. One possibility is pre-existing polygenic vulnerability.

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Background: Social cognitive impairment is a recognized feature of psychotic disorders. However, potential age-related differences in social cognitive impairment have rarely been studied.

Study Design: Data came from 905 individuals with a psychotic disorder, 966 unaffected siblings, and 544 never-psychotic controls aged 18-55 who participated in the Genetic Risk and Outcome of Psychosis (GROUP) study.

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Background: The 22q11.2 deletion (22q11Del) is among the strongest known genetic risk factors for psychosis. Stress, a known risk factor for psychosis in the general population, has seldom been studied in 22q11Del.

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Article Synopsis
  • Studies suggest that DNA-methylation (DNAm) may be influenced by childhood adversity (CA) and could play a role in the development of psychotic disorders, although the specific mediating effects remain unexplored.
  • Researchers conducted an epigenome-wide association study comparing first-episode psychosis patients (n=366) to healthy controls (n=517) using the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire to create adversity scores, but found that no specific CpG sites significantly mediated the relationship between CA and psychosis after statistical corrections.
  • While several genes showed differential methylation related to CA, and previous studies linked some of these genes to psychosis, the analysis did not identify conclusive biological pathways, hinting at potential factors such as mitochondrial
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Background: The role of loneliness and social exclusion in the development of paranoia is largely unexplored. Negative affect may mediate potential associations between these factors. We investigated the temporal relationships of daily-life loneliness, felt social exclusion, negative affect, and paranoia across the psychosis continuum.

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