Letter to the EditorTemporal stability of self-disorders and longitudinal unfolding of symptom dimensions: A complementary analysis
Section snippets
Analytic procedure
We extrapolated the set of inter-correlations among psychopathological dimensions from Nordgaard et al. (2017) and tested the longitudinal unfolding of SD with respect to the other explored symptom dimensions (i.e. PANSS positive and negative symptoms) through a network model. Comparisons between correlations in the same sample were calculated with the test of Steiger by using the “cocor” package running in R (Diedenhofen and Musch, 2015).
Results
The (longitudinal) psychopathological trajectories across symptom dimensions are shown in Fig. 1, which reveals the increasing strength of their temporal interconnectedness over the 5 years' follow-up. In particular: a) the homotypic positive association (longitudinal autocorrelations) between SD at baseline and at follow-up, and negative symptoms at baseline and at follow-up are of comparable magnitude (Steiger's test: z = 1.73, p = 0.083); also the homotypic positive association between negative
Discussion
The inter-connection among psychopathological dimensions (i.e. SD, positive and negative symptoms) appears stronger at follow-up, and both SD and negative symptoms are more stable than positive symptoms. While from a clinical viewpoint it is intuitive that productive symptoms (such as hallucinations, delusions and agitation) are more sensitive to antipsychotic treatment than negative symptoms (e.g. apathy, avolition, anhedonia, or social withdrawal), it is noteworthy that subjective experiences
Conclusions
Taken together with converging literature (Parnas et al., 2011, Koren et al., 2013, Raballo et al., 2016) these results: a) underscore the psychopathological pivotal role of SD for symptom progression within the clinical schizophrenia spectrum; b) confirm that SD reflect an alteration in the basic psychological structure of schizophrenia that is associated with the longitudinal unfolding of positive and negative symptom dimensions; c) strengthen the rationale for an evaluation of SD as a
Role of funding source
This work was supported by the Onsager Fellowship programme in Psychopathology and Development from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU). No funding agency influenced any aspect of the current work.
Contributors
Andrea Raballo and Antonio Preti jointly designed the study, performed the statistical analysis, interpreted the data and wrote the final manuscript.
Conflict of interest
There are no conflicts of interest concerning this article.
Acknowledgement
None.
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2020, Schizophrenia ResearchCitation Excerpt :Jointly, these studies show that self-disorders (SDs) hyper-aggregate in schizophrenia and its spectrum diagnoses (schizotypal disorder, and other non-organic, non-affective psychoses) compared to other psychotic disorders (such as bipolar disorder) among first-episode patients (Nelson et al., 2013; Nordgaard and Parnas, 2014; Parnas et al., 2005a) and first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients with a gradual intensification along the severity level of the schizophrenia spectrum condition (Raballo and Parnas, 2011). Also, they show that SDs are moderately-to-highly stable over time (Nordgaard et al., 2017a; Nordgaard et al., 2017b; Raballo and Preti, 2018a, 2018b; Svendsen et al., 2018), and predict the onset of schizophrenia spectrum illness five years after first-hospitalization for treatment of a non-psychotic disorder (Parnas et al., 2011a). An important open question is the degree to which SD is a core vulnerability feature of schizophrenia that can be detected before the illness onset among help-seeking adolescents.
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2020, Consciousness and CognitionCitation Excerpt :As a result of the perceptual biases and diminished self-presence/hyperreflexivity, an individual overly focuses on (generally implicit) bodily sensations (anomalous bodily experiences) and may find it difficult to make sense of their surroundings or previous events as there is an overload of information (alienation from surroundings; anomalous subjective recall) and may downregulate emotional responsivity in order to prevent overstimulation or distress (emotional numbing) (Sierra, Baker, Medford, & David, 2005). Anomalous self-experiences have been suggested to give rise to anomalous perceptual experiences (Nelson, Whitford, Lavoie, & Sass, 2014; Nelson, Parnas, & Sass, 2014; Raballo, 2017; Raballo & Preti, 2018a). This is one route via which anomalous perceptual experiences develop (an another route is that aberrant perceptual experiences, e.g. perceptual organisation, contribute to disturbed self-experience (Uhlhaas & Mishara, 2007)), as the anomalous self-experiences become strengthened and thematized (Raballo, 2012; Raballo & Preti, 2018b).
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2018, Schizophrenia ResearchCitation Excerpt :Therefore, our results strongly suggest that the distribution pattern, previously reported on adult samples (Raballo et al., 2011; Raballo and Parnas, 2012; Nordgaard and Parnas, 2014; Parnas and Henriksen, 2014), could be generalized to adolescents as well. This is in line with the notion of SD as trait-like experiential features (Nordgaard et al., 2017; Raballo and Preti, 2018a; Nordgaard et al., 2018; Raballo and Preti, 2018b) indexing individuals with the propensity to develop schizophrenia spectrum conditions (Raballo and Parnas, 2011; Raballo, 2009; Parnas, 2011). Likewise, the relatively low frequency of SD in not-at-risk, non-psychotic subjects (CHSC) is comparable to the one reported for non-schizophrenia spectrum disorders in other studies (Raballo and Parnas, 2012; Haug et al., 2012; Nordgaard and Parnas, 2014).
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