Antisaccade performance in biological relatives of schizophrenia patients: a meta-analysis

Levy, Deborah L.; O'Driscoll, Gillian; Matthysse, Steven; Cook, Samantha R.; Holzman, Philip S.; Mendell, Nancy R.

doi:10.1016/j.schres.2003.11.006

« Previous Next »Schizophrenia Research
Volume 71, Issue 1 , Pages 113-125, 1 November 2004

Antisaccade performance in biological relatives of schizophrenia patients: a meta-analysis

Deborah L. Levy
- Corresponding author. Tel.: +1-617-855-2854; fax: +1-617-855-2778.
- Psychology Research Laboratory, McLean Hospital, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478, USA
Gillian O'Driscoll
- Department of Psychology and Douglas Hospital Research Center, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
Steven Matthysse
- Psychology Research Laboratory, McLean Hospital, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478, USA
Samantha R. Cook
- Department of Statistics, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA 02138, USA
Philip S. Holzman
- Psychology Research Laboratory, McLean Hospital, 115 Mill Street, Belmont, MA 02478, USA
Nancy R. Mendell
- Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY 11794, USA

Received 4 September 2003; accepted 12 November 2003.

Abstract

Poor performance on the antisaccade (AS) task has been interpreted as a potential indicator of genetic liability that may enhance the power of linkage studies of a multidimensional phenotype for schizophrenia. Every study has replicated the finding of significantly worse performance in schizophrenia patients regardless of which specific antisaccade paradigm was employed. In some studies involving a standard version of the antisaccade task, relatives of schizophrenia patients made an increased number of errors, but in other studies that used this same paradigm, relatives of schizophrenia patients did not differ from controls. In this paper, we report the results of a meta-analysis on studies that used the standard antisaccade paradigm. The meta-analysis shows that those studies that reported large effect sizes and statistically significant differences between relatives of schizophrenia patients and controls used inclusion/exclusion criteria that were not symmetrical between the two groups, whereas those studies that reported small and nonsignificant differences between relatives of schizophrenia patients and controls used symmetrical inclusion/exclusion criteria. Specifically, studies that applied stricter psychopathology exclusion criteria to controls than to relatives of schizophrenia patients had larger effect sizes than studies that applied comparable exclusion criteria to both groups, suggesting that antisaccade performance is compromised by psychopathology in general rather than by schizophrenia per se. Since symmetrical inclusion/exclusion criteria between relatives of schizophrenia patients and controls are essential for a genetic analysis, and those studies that did apply symmetrical criteria had small effect sizes, the available data suggest that poor antisaccade performance is unlikely to be useful in identifying clinically unaffected carriers of genes for schizophrenia.

Keywords: Schizophrenia, Antisaccade performance, Meta-analysis