News

Halting Schizophrenia Before It Starts

Hear Meghan's story with early pscyhosis. Read more, or listen to the podcast, on NPR.

What Is Schizophrenia? Scientists Call for New Thinking

Schizophrenia is twice as common as Alzheimer’s disease, but almost nothing is known about how it works in the body. As with most other mental illnesses, there’s no blood test for schizophrenia, no scan that can diagnose it. Instead, schizophrenia is defined by symptoms patients describe about...

Scalp EEG Test May Be Able to Predict Future Psychosis

The clinical symptoms currently used to predict a patient’s risk of future psychosis fail two-thirds of the time. Only one-in-three people identified by clinical criteria as being at risk actually developed a psychotic disorder in a three-year follow-up study. This makes the decision to prescribe,...

Study Demonstrates 'Mismatch Negativity' as Potential Biomarker for Psychotic Disorder

A new biomarker may be on the horizon to more accurately identify psychiatric patients who may later develop fulminant psychosis, according to a study published in yesterday's Biological Psychiatry.

A brain signal for psychosis risk

"Our study results show that mismatch negativity deficits precede the onset of psychosis in clinical high risk individuals, and further shows that the larger the deficit, the more imminent the risk for conversion to a psychotic disorder," said Dr. Daniel Mathalon, Professor of Psychiatry at the...

Recognizing the Self: Mechanisms of Schizophrenia

What if you heard voices when there was no one there? What if the reality around you slowly disintegrated? According to collaborative research between Judith M. Ford and Daniel H. Mathalon, Adjunct Professors of Psychiatry, dysfunction of a critical brain mechanism may be responsible for the...

Researchers discover that chronic schizophrenia in men causes progressive decline in brain volume

Men with chronic schizophrenia lose brain volume at a faster rate than the normal aging changes seen in men without the mental illness, a study by a Yale researcher shows.