Centre for Youth Mental Health - Research Publications

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    Dynamics between insight and medication adherence in first-episode psychosis: Study of 3-year trajectories.
    Elowe, J ; Ramain, J ; Solida, A ; Conus, P ; Golay, P (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2022-08-15)
    BACKGROUND: While specialized early intervention programs represent the gold standard in terms of optimal management of first-episode psychosis (FEP), poor medication adherence remains a predominant unmet need in the treatment of psychosis. In this regard, an interaction between insight and adherence in FEP patients has been hypothesized but has been challenged by multiple pitfalls. METHODS: Latent profile analysis and trajectory modeling techniques were used to evaluate insight and adherence of 331 FEP patients engaged at the beginning, middle, and end of a 3-year specialized early psychosis program. A Bayesian model comparison approach was used to compare scores of clinical, functional, and socioeconomic outcomes at the end point of the study. RESULTS: Nearly one-third of the patients maintain a high level of insight and adherence during the entire program. At the end of the 3-year follow-up, more than three-quarters of patients are considered adherent to their medication. Patients with low levels of insight and adherence at the beginning of the program improve first in terms of adherence and then of insight. Furthermore, patients with high levels of insight and adherence are most likely to reach functional recovery and to experience an increase in environmental quality of life. CONCLUSIONS: Latent FEP subpopulations can be identified based on insight and adherence. Medication adherence was the first variable to improve, but a gain in insight possibly plays a role in the reinforcement of adherence.
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    Evolution of impulsivity levels in relation to early cannabis use in violent patients in the early phase of psychosis.
    Dan-Glauser, E ; Framorando, D ; Solida-Tozzi, A ; Golay, P ; Gholam, MM ; Alameda, L ; Conus, P ; Moulin, V (Cambridge University Press (CUP), 2023-05)
    BACKGROUND: Prevention of violent behaviors (VB) in the early phase of psychosis (EPP) is a real challenge. Impulsivity was shown to be strongly related to VB, and different evolutions of impulsivity were noticed along treatments. One possible variable involved in the relationship between VB and the evolution of impulsivity is cannabis use (CU). The high prevalence of CU in EPP and its relationship with VB led us to investigate: 1/the impact of CU and 2/the impact of early CU on the evolution of impulsivity levels during a 3-year program, in violent and non-violent EPP patients. METHODS: 178 non-violent and 62 violent patients (VPs) were followed-up over a 3 year period. Age of onset of CU was assessed at program entry and impulsivity was assessed seven times during the program. The evolution of impulsivity level during the program, as a function of the violent and non-violent groups of patients and CU precocity were analyzed with linear mixed-effects models. RESULTS: Over the treatment period, impulsivity level did not evolve as a function of the interaction between group and CU (coef. = 0.02, p = 0.425). However, when including precocity of CU, impulsivity was shown to increase significantly only in VPs who start consuming before 15 years of age (coef. = 0.06, p = 0.008). CONCLUSION: The precocity of CU in VPs seems to be a key variable of the negative evolution of impulsivity during follow-up and should be closely monitored in EPP patients entering care since they have a higher risk of showing VB.
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    Mental health service areas in Switzerland.
    Stulz, N ; Jörg, R ; Reim-Gautier, C ; Bonsack, C ; Conus, P ; Evans-Lacko, S ; Gabriel-Felleiter, K ; Heim, E ; Jäger, M ; Knapp, M ; Richter, D ; Schneeberger, A ; Thornicroft, G ; Traber, R ; Wieser, S ; Tuch, A ; Hepp, U (Wiley, 2023-03)
    OBJECTIVES: Small area analysis is a health services research technique that facilitates geographical comparison of services supply and utilization rates between health service areas (HSAs). HSAs are functionally relevant regions around medical facilities within which most residents undergo treatment. We aimed to identify HSAs for psychiatric outpatient care (HSA-PSY) in Switzerland. METHODS: We used HSAr, a new and automated methodological approach, and comprehensive psychiatric service use data from insurances to identify HSA-PSY based on travel patterns between patients' residences and service sites. Resulting HSA-PSY were compared geographically, demographically and regarding the use of inpatient and outpatient psychiatric services. RESULTS: We identified 68 HSA-PSY, which were reviewed and validated by local mental health services experts. The population-based rate of inpatient and outpatient service utilization varied considerably between HSA-PSY. Utilization of inpatient and outpatient services tended to be positively associated across HSA-PSY. CONCLUSIONS: Wide variation of service use between HSA-PSY can hardly be fully explained by underlying differences in the prevalence or incidence of disorders. Whether other factors such as the amount of services supply did add to the high variation should be addressed in further studies, for which our functional mapping on a small-scale regional level provides a good analytical framework.
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    Time of exposure to social defeat stress during childhood and adolescence and redox dysregulation on long-lasting behavioral changes, a translational study.
    Schnider, M ; Jenni, R ; Ramain, J ; Camporesi, S ; Golay, P ; Alameda, L ; Conus, P ; Do, KQ ; Steullet, P (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-09-26)
    Traumatic events during childhood/early adolescence can cause long-lasting physiological and behavioral changes with increasing risk for psychiatric conditions including psychosis. Genetic factors and trauma (and their type, degree of repetition, time of occurrence) are believed to influence how traumatic experiences affect an individual. Here, we compared long-lasting behavioral effects of repeated social defeat stress (SD) applied during either peripuberty or late adolescence in adult male WT and Gclm-KO mice, a model of redox dysregulation relevant to schizophrenia. As SD disrupts redox homeostasis and causes oxidative stress, we hypothesized that KO mice would be particularly vulnerable to such stress. We first found that peripubertal and late adolescent SD led to different behavioral outcomes. Peripubertal SD induced anxiety-like behavior in anxiogenic environments, potentiated startle reflex, and increased sensitivity to the NMDA-receptor antagonist, MK-801. In contrast, late adolescent SD led to increased exploration in novel environments. Second, the long-lasting impact of peripubertal but not late adolescent SD differed in KO and WT mice. Peripubertal SD increased anxiety-like behavior in anxiogenic environments and MK-801-sensitivity mostly in KO mice, while it increased startle reflex in WT mice. These suggest that a redox dysregulation during peripuberty interacts with SD to remodel the trajectory of brain maturation, but does not play a significant role during later SD. As peripubertal SD induced persisting anxiety- and fear-related behaviors in male mice, we then investigated anxiety in a cohort of 89 early psychosis male patients for whom we had information about past abuse and clinical assessment during the first year of psychosis. We found that a first exposure to physical/sexual abuse (analogous to SD) before age 12, but not after, was associated with higher anxiety at 6-12 months after psychosis onset. This supports that childhood/peripuberty is a vulnerable period during which physical/sexual abuse in males has wide and long-lasting consequences.
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    Gene set enrichment analysis of pathophysiological pathways highlights oxidative stress in psychosis.
    Pistis, G ; Vázquez-Bourgon, J ; Fournier, M ; Jenni, R ; Cleusix, M ; Papiol, S ; Smart, SE ; Pardiñas, AF ; Walters, JTR ; MacCabe, JH ; Kutalik, Z ; Conus, P ; Crespo-Facorro, B ; Q Do, K (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-12)
    Polygenic risk prediction remains an important aim of genetic association studies. Currently, the predictive power of schizophrenia polygenic risk scores (PRSs) is not large enough to allow highly accurate discrimination between cases and controls and thus is not adequate for clinical integration. Since PRSs are rarely used to reveal biological functions or to validate candidate pathways, to fill this gap, we investigated whether their predictive ability could be improved by building genome-wide (GW-PRSs) and pathway-specific PRSs, using distance- or expression quantitative trait loci (eQTLs)- based mapping between genetic variants and genes. We focused on five pathways (glutamate, oxidative stress, GABA/interneurons, neuroimmune/neuroinflammation and myelin) which belong to a critical hub of schizophrenia pathophysiology, centred on redox dysregulation/oxidative stress. Analyses were first performed in the Lausanne Treatment and Early Intervention in Psychosis Program (TIPP) study (n = 340, cases/controls: 208/132), a sample of first-episode of psychosis patients and matched controls, and then validated in an independent study, the epidemiological and longitudinal intervention program of First-Episode Psychosis in Cantabria (PAFIP) (n = 352, 224/128). Our results highlighted two main findings. First, GW-PRSs for schizophrenia were significantly associated with early psychosis status. Second, oxidative stress was the only significantly associated pathway that showed an enrichment in both the TIPP (p = 0.03) and PAFIP samples (p = 0.002), and exclusively when gene-variant linking was done using eQTLs. The results suggest that the predictive accuracy of polygenic risk scores could be improved with the inclusion of information from functional annotations, and through a focus on specific pathways, emphasizing the need to build and study functionally informed risk scores.
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    Effects of psychotropic switches on weight change: a prospective cohort study
    Piras, M ; Ranjbar, S ; Dubath, C ; Laaboub, N ; Grosu, C ; Gamma, F ; Von Plessen, K ; Von Gunten, A ; Conus, P ; Eap, C (Royal College of Psychiatrists, 2022-06)
    Introduction Many psychotropic drugs can induce weight gain with differences in their metabolic risk profiles (i.e. high, medium or low-risk). Objectives To compare the weight evolution of patients switching versus patients keeping their psychotropic drugs with different risk-profiles. Methods Data for patients switching or keeping the same drug were obtained from the Psyclin (from 2007 to 2015) and Psymetab (2007- 2019) cohort studies, conducted at the Lausanne University Hospital, Switzerland. Patients either switched from a high to a low-risk, a high to a medium-risk, a medium to a low-risk drug, or for a drug with the same risk category. Patients not switching either kept a high, medium or low-risk drug. The evolution of weight is currently being analyzed using a linear mixed-effect model. Results Preliminary results showed that switching from a high to low-risk molecule had the strongest impact on weight changes. The analysis being ongoing, the quantitative results will be presented at the congress. Conclusions Switching from a high-risk to a low-risk molecule is likely to have the strongest impact on weight changes. Disclosure No significant relationships.
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    The differential impact of duration of untreated psychosis on functioning and quality of life: A threshold analysis.
    Golay, P ; Ramain, J ; Mebdouhi, N ; Abrahamyan Empson, L ; Elowe, J ; Solida, A ; Conus, P (Wiley, 2023-04)
    AIM: Reduction of duration of untreated psychosis (DUP) remains a key goal of early intervention programs. While a significant body of literature suggests that a short DUP has a positive impact on outcome, little is known regarding the threshold above which various dimensions of outcome are impaired. In this study, we explore the DUP threshold that best discriminates subgroups with poorer outcome regarding global functioning and quality of life after 3 years of treatment. METHOD: A total of 432 patients were followed-up prospectively over 3 years. Several hypothetical cut-off points for DUP were tested in order to maximize differences in effect size for quality of life and general functioning. RESULTS: While a DUP cut-off of 86 weeks defined two subpopulations with a difference of greatest effect size in quality of life after 3 years, it is already at a cut-off of 3 weeks of DUP that two subpopulations with a difference in global functioning of the greatest effect size was reached. CONCLUSION: DUP seems to have a differential impact on the various components of outcome, and in particular on quality of life and global functioning. Our data suggest that aiming at very short DUP is justified, but that DUP over 3 weeks are still compatible with good quality of life after 3 years of treatment.
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    The psychosis metabolic risk calculator (PsyMetRiC) for young people with psychosis: International external validation and site-specific recalibration in two independent European samples.
    Perry, BI ; Vandenberghe, F ; Garrido-Torres, N ; Osimo, EF ; Piras, M ; Vazquez-Bourgon, J ; Upthegrove, R ; Grosu, C ; De La Foz, VO-G ; Jones, PB ; Laaboub, N ; Ruiz-Veguilla, M ; Stochl, J ; Dubath, C ; Canal-Rivero, M ; Mallikarjun, P ; Delacrétaz, A ; Ansermot, N ; Fernandez-Egea, E ; Crettol, S ; Gamma, F ; Plessen, KJ ; Conus, P ; Khandaker, GM ; Murray, GK ; Eap, CB ; Crespo-Facorro, B (Elsevier BV, 2022-11)
    BACKGROUND: Cardiometabolic dysfunction is common in young people with psychosis. Recently, the Psychosis Metabolic Risk Calculator (PsyMetRiC) was developed and externally validated in the UK, predicting up-to six-year risk of metabolic syndrome (MetS) from routinely collected data. The full-model includes age, sex, ethnicity, body-mass index, smoking status, prescription of metabolically-active antipsychotic medication, high-density lipoprotein, and triglyceride concentrations; the partial-model excludes biochemical predictors. METHODS: To move toward a future internationally-useful tool, we externally validated PsyMetRiC in two independent European samples. We used data from the PsyMetab (Lausanne, Switzerland) and PAFIP (Cantabria, Spain) cohorts, including participants aged 16-35y without MetS at baseline who had 1-6y follow-up. Predictive performance was assessed primarily via discrimination (C-statistic), calibration (calibration plots), and decision curve analysis. Site-specific recalibration was considered. FINDINGS: We included 1024 participants (PsyMetab n=558, male=62%, outcome prevalence=19%, mean follow-up=2.48y; PAFIP n=466, male=65%, outcome prevalence=14%, mean follow-up=2.59y). Discrimination was better in the full- compared with partial-model (PsyMetab=full-model C=0.73, 95% C.I., 0.68-0.79, partial-model C=0.68, 95% C.I., 0.62-0.74; PAFIP=full-model C=0.72, 95% C.I., 0.66-0.78; partial-model C=0.66, 95% C.I., 0.60-0.71). As expected, calibration plots revealed varying degrees of miscalibration, which recovered following site-specific recalibration. PsyMetRiC showed net benefit in both new cohorts, more so after recalibration. INTERPRETATION: The study provides evidence of PsyMetRiC's generalizability in Western Europe, although further local and international validation studies are required. In future, PsyMetRiC could help clinicians internationally to identify young people with psychosis who are at higher cardiometabolic risk, so interventions can be directed effectively to reduce long-term morbidity and mortality. FUNDING: NIHR Cambridge Biomedical Research Centre (BRC-1215-20014); The Wellcome Trust (201486/Z/16/Z); Swiss National Research Foundation (320030-120686, 324730- 144064, and 320030-173211); The Carlos III Health Institute (CM20/00015, FIS00/3095, PI020499, PI050427, and PI060507); IDIVAL (INT/A21/10 and INT/A20/04); The Andalusian Regional Government (A1-0055-2020 and A1-0005-2021); SENY Fundacion Research (2005-0308007); Fundacion Marques de Valdecilla (A/02/07, API07/011); Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness and the European Fund for Regional Development (SAF2016-76046-R and SAF2013-46292-R).For the Spanish and French translation of the abstract see Supplementary Materials section.
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    Publisher Correction: Insomnia disorders are associated with increased cardiometabolic disturbances and death risks from cardiovascular diseases in psychiatric patients treated with weight-gain-inducing psychotropic drugs: results from a Swiss cohort.
    Laaboub, N ; Dubath, C ; Ranjbar, S ; Sibailly, G ; Grosu, C ; Piras, M ; Délessert, D ; Richard-Lepouriel, H ; Ansermot, N ; Crettol, S ; Vandenberghe, F ; Grandjean, C ; Delacrétaz, A ; Gamma, F ; Plessen, KJ ; von Gunten, A ; Conus, P ; Eap, CB (Springer Science and Business Media LLC, 2022-07-08)