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L Erlenmeyer-Kimling

Publications and source records attributed to L Erlenmeyer-Kimling.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed2000

Neurobehavioral deficits in offspring of schizophrenic parents: liability indicators and predictors of illness.

High-risk research in schizophrenia incorporates several different strategies for studying individuals who are defined by different criteria as being at risk for future development of schizophrenia. Variables from a wide range of domains have been included in these studies. Several reviews of high-risk research have attempted to cover the field broadly, whereas others have been more sharply focused on research subjects defined by specific criteria or on particular classes of variables. Among the review articles and collections of project reports on high-risk research in the past two decades are: Watt et al. [1984: Children at risk for schizophrenia: a longitudinal perspective]; Nuechterlein and Dawson [1984: Schizophr Bull 10:160-203]; Nuechterlein [1986: J Child Psychol Psychiatr 27:133-144]; Erlenmeyer-Kimling and Cornblatt [1987: J Psychiatr Res 26:405-426]; Goldstein and Tuma [1987: Schizophr Bull 13:369-371]; Asarnow [1988: Schizophr Bull 14:613-631]; Moldin and Erlenmeyer-Kimling [1994: Schizophr Bull 20:25-29]; Mirsky [1995: Schizophr Bull 21:179-182]; Gooding and Iacono [1995: Manual of developmental psychopathology] McNeil [1995: Epidemiol Rev 17:107-112] Olin and Mednick [1996: Schizophr Bull 22:223-240]; Cornblatt and Obuchowski [1997: Intl Rev Psychiatry 9:437-447]. This paper presents an overview of findings from recent (the past decade and a half) prospective studies of children of schizophrenic parents, with a focus on neurobehavioral (neurocognitive, neuromotor, and neurophysiological) variables that may reflect aspects of the genetic liability to schizophrenia and related disorders. The few neuroimaging studies on children of schizophrenic parents are also briefly mentioned. Because of space limitations, the overview is not intended as a comprehensive or detailed review of this area of high-risk research.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1999

Cognitive and behavioral precursors of schizophrenia.

Attentional deficits are well-established characteristics of patients with schizophrenia and their at-risk offspring, suggesting a biological connection between attention and schizophrenia. The goal of this study is to clarify the developmental role of attention in the illness. Data has been collected from 87 subjects at high and low risk for schizophrenia who have participated in the New York High-Risk Project from 1977 to the present. Individuals are considered to be at high risk if either or both of their parents has schizophrenia. Analyses of attention and global behaviors, measured at intervals from about 12 to 26 years of age, indicate (a) attentional deficits can be reliably detected in high-risk children who will develop future schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (the prespectrum [PSP] group); (b) these deficits are stable, enduring over time, and appear to reflect a compromised attentional capacity; (c) attention is not affected by the onset of illness in the PSP group; (d) for all subjects, attention and global behaviors follow independent developmental pathways; and (e) behavioral difficulties, but not attention deficits, appear to be highly sensitive to environmental factors, especially rearing by a mentally ill parent. It is concluded that in PSP individuals impaired attention probably results from prenatal developmental abnormalities (possibly on the cellular level) and is likely to be a marker of a biological vulnerability to schizophrenia. In addition, attentional deficits, as opposed to early behavioral difficulties, are concluded to be a useful first step in screening for youngsters in need of early intervention.

Attention↗
PubMed1999

Relationship between childhood behavioral disturbance and later schizophrenia in the New York High-Risk Project.

OBJECTIVE: An association between childhood behavioral disturbance and adulthood schizophrenia has been seen previously in retrospective or follow-back studies and in prospective studies. The authors examined the relationship between childhood behavioral problems and adulthood schizophrenia-related psychoses. Because a high rate of childhood behavioral problems is known to be associated with adult substance abuse, these analyses controlled for substance abuse. METHOD: The subjects of this investigation (N = 185) were offspring of parents with schizophrenia or affective disorder and of normal parents from the New York High-Risk Project (sample A). Data on childhood behavioral problems were obtained in a parent interview at initial assessment in 1971-1972. Adulthood outcomes (schizophrenia-related psychoses, affective disorders, anxiety disorders, substance abuse) were based on lifetime axis I diagnoses according to the Research Diagnostic Criteria. RESULTS: Substance abuse had a significant interaction with the clinical outcome groups. In subjects without substance abuse, those with schizophrenia-related psychoses had exhibited significantly more behavioral problems as children than had adult offspring with affective or anxiety disorder or with substance abuse only or no disorder. CONCLUSIONS: These results support the view that schizophrenia-related psychoses can be followed back to early behavioral disturbances. The confounding effects of substance abuse should be statistically controlled in studies of longitudinal associations between childhood behavioral disturbance and axis I outcomes.

Adult↗
PubMed1998

The New York High-Risk Project: social and general intelligence in children at risk for schizophrenia.

UNLABELLED: Social deficits, as well as low performance on intelligence tests, are known early symptoms of schizophrenia. We studied whether impairment of social intelligence can be detected before the outbreak of the disorder. In the New York High-Risk Project, children at risk for schizophrenia (HRSz) or affective disorder (HRAff) and a normal control group (NC) were studied over the past 26 years. The children are now in mid-adulthood, with known psychiatric outcomes. Developmental and clinical data from childhood can now be related to adulthood diagnoses. We compared mean WISC (or WISC-R) and WAIS (or WAIS-R) scores from childhood and adolescence, and change of IQ, between the risk groups, as well as between the adulthood outcomes. We were specifically interested in the development of social intelligence (the Picture Arrangement and Comprehension subtests). We used logistic regression analyses to generate a model predicting adulthood schizophrenia. RESULTS: IQ at age 9,7 was lower in children with HRSz than with HRAff. Adulthood schizophrenia, compared with major depressive disorder and no psychiatric diagnosis could not be related conclusively to low IQ. This may be a result of the study design, since children with IQ below 70 or behavioral problems were not eligible as study subjects. There was no evidence of lower scores or more decline in social intelligence related to age or group membership (risk or outcome). Subtest-Scatter, a nondirectional measure of the differences between all subtests and Vocabulary, reflecting a lesser difference between crystallized and fluid intelligence, was identified as a significant predictor of adulthood schizophrenia, in the whole group as well as in the HRSz group alone.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1998

The New York High-Risk Project: attention, anhedonia and social outcome.

In the New York High-Risk Project we have followed two samples of subjects (Sample A and Sample B) at risk for schizophrenic or affective disorders and low-risk controls from childhood to adulthood, in an attempt to identify early predictors of later psychopathology. We administered a large number of cognitive, psychometric and other types of measures to both samples as possible psychopathology predictors, including an index of attentional deviance assessed in childhood, the Physical Anhedonia Scale in adolescence, and three measures of social outcome in adulthood ('Suspicious Solitude', 'Social Insecurity', and 'Lack of Empathy'), derived from the Personality Disorders Examination. In the analysis of the combined samples, parental diagnostic group, gender, attentional deviance in childhood, and physical anhedonia in adolescence were used to predict three measures of social outcome in adulthood. While only physical anhedonia was directly related to all three social outcome measures, with the strongest relationship to Suspicious Solitude, attention deviance successfully predicted two of the three outcomes. Subjects at risk for affective disorder did not show increased levels of attention deviance, physical anhedonia, or social dysfunction, relative to the normal control subjects. Attention deviance appears to be a key neurobiological indicator and physical anhedonia appears to be a potentiating factor mediating the relationship between risk for schizophrenia and later social dysfunction.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Eye-tracking dysfunction in offspring from the New York High-Risk Project: diagnostic specificity and the role of attention.

Eye tracking abnormalities were studied in the offspring of schizophrenic, unipolar depressed and bipolar probands from the New York High-Risk Project to examine their familial specificity. Offspring of schizophrenic and depressed probands both had significant global performance deficits based on spectral purity measurements, but only the offspring of schizophrenic probands had an increased rate of intrusive anticipatory saccades. The greater specificity of high anticipatory saccade rate than global performance impairment suggests that this eye movement abnormality may provide a more specific biological marker of risk for schizophrenia than the global measure of eye tracking performance used in this study. Attention facilitation effectively normalized all performance deficits in the offspring of schizophrenic patients, suggesting that a problem sustaining focused visual attention may contribute to eye tracking deficits observed in the relatives of schizophrenic probands.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

The New York High-Risk Project. Prevalence and comorbidity of axis I disorders in offspring of schizophrenic parents at 25-year follow-up.

BACKGROUND: The New York High-Risk Project is a study of offspring of patients with schizophrenia (HRSz group) or affective illness (HRAff group) and psychiatrically normal parents (NC group) observed prospectively from childhood to adulthood. We herein present lifetime prevalence and comorbidity rates of Axis I disorders in subjects and their siblings from sample A of the project. METHODS: Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia-Lifetime Version interviews conducted with the offspring in adulthood were used to obtain diagnoses of Axis I disorders. RESULTS: Schizophrenia and unspecified psychoses occurred only in the HRSz group. However, schizoaffective and psychotic affective disorders occurred equally in the HRSz and HRAff groups. Total rates of psychosis in these groups were significantly higher than in the NC group. All groups had similar rates of nonpsychotic affective and substance abuse disorders. The HRAff group, however, had significantly more total affective illness than the NC group and tended to have more anxiety disorders than the other groups. Comorbidity rates in the HRSz and HRAff groups were nearly twice those of the NC group. CONCLUSIONS: The familial liabilities to schizophrenia and affective disorders show specificities and commonalities, differing markedly from each other in their expression of some disorders and sharing others. Patterns of comorbidity are generally, although not entirely, similar to these liabilities.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1997

Negative and positive dimensions of schizotypal personality disorder.

The positive (perceptual-cognitive) and negative (social-interpersonal) dimensions of schizotypal personality traits were examined in biological relatives of individuals with Axis I disorder. The subjects were young adult offspring from three contrasting parental groups, including schizophrenic disorder, affective disorder, and normal controls. Cognitive correlates, including digit span (presumed to assess working memory) and P3 amplitudes, were also examined. Preliminary results showed that positive and negative dimensions were distinguished by different prevalence patterns in the offspring subjects, and by a different pattern of correlations with cognitive measures. Negative dimensions were more frequent in offspring from the schizophrenic parental group than in the offspring from affective disorder and normal control parental groups. Digits forward and backward, and P3 amplitude decrements, characterized a subset of offspring with negative features from the schizophrenic parental group. Positive dimensions did not differ between the psychiatric parental groups, and did not covary with digit span or P3 amplitude assessments. These results support the view that positive and negative dimensions may reflect separable pathophysiologic processes.

Adult↗
PubMed1995

The New York High-Risk Project. Psychoses and cluster A personality disorders in offspring of schizophrenic parents at 23 years of follow-up.

BACKGROUND: We herein present lifetime prevalence rates of psychoses and DSM-III-R cluster A personality disorders in sample A of the New York High-Risk Project, a prospective study following offspring of parents with schizophrenia (HRSz subjects) and affective illness (HRAff subjects) and of psychiatrically normal parents (NC subjects) from midchildhood to adulthood. METHODS: We interviewed the offspring in adulthood with the Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia, Lifetime Version, for Axis I disorders and the Personality Disorder Examination for Axis II disorders. RESULTS: Lifetime prevalence rates (+/- SE) of schizophrenia and unspecified psychosis were 11.1% +/- 4.3% and 5.6% +/- 3.1%, respectively, in the HRSz group and 0% in the HRAff and NC groups. Rates of schizoaffective disorder subclassified as mainly schizophrenic, however, were highest in the HRAff group. Rates of psychotic affective disorders did not differ between the HRSz and other groups. Age-corrected morbidity risks were similar to lifetime prevalence rates. Rates of the three cluster A personality disorders did not differ among the groups, but the combined rate was greater in the HRSz and HRAff groups than in the NC group. CONCLUSIONS: Our data strongly support a specific familial liability to narrowly defined schizophrenia that is not shared by families of probands with affective disorder. Schizoaffective disorder and cluster A personality disorders, however, occur in families of both schizophrenic probands and probands with affective disorder. Psychotic affective disorders, which are not increased in HRSz subjects, do not appear to be an expression of the liability to schizophrenia.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Latent structure of DSM-III-R Axis II psychopathology in a normal sample.

The Personality Disorder Examination was administered to 302 normal controls in the New York High-Risk Project in order to elicit Axis II diagnoses (revised 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; American Psychiatric Association, 1987) and quantitative dimensions of psychopathology. LISREL confirmatory factor analysis was used to evaluate the Axis II hypothesis of 3 orthogonal factors. There was considerable overlap among personality disorders. The best fitting LISREL model was of 3 oblique factors that were different for male and female subjects. Given that our choice of variables to constrain in order to mathematically identify our models was partially based on analysis of intercorrelations in our data set, our methods were not purely confirmatory. We present our results not to confirm specific hypotheses but to generate explicit hypotheses that can be tested in independent samples.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

Measuring liability to schizophrenia: progress report 1994: editors' introduction.

The first aim of this issue of the Schizophrenia Bulletin is to provide an up-to-date review of the major domains of research in the experimental psychopathology of schizophrenia, in which important contributions to our understanding of putative pathophysiologic mechanisms have been made. This research has identified several biobehavioral traits as measures of enhanced liability to schizophrenia. Rather than present a substantive review of the research on a particular trait, the authors of several articles focus on a critical appraisal and evaluation of the literature since 1987 in their particular area. The second aim of this issue is to present new methodologic approaches and conceptualizations for incorporating biobehavioral trait data in future psychiatric research designs. Now is the time not only to recognize past contributions but also to recognize that further advances in our understanding of the etiology and pathophysiology of schizophrenia may depend on continued research in experimental psychopathology that culminates in an integration in both methods and research design across disparate scientific fields.

Humans↗
PubMed1994

Social competence deficits in adolescents at risk for schizophrenia.

Social competence in subjects at risk for schizophrenia and affective disorder and in normal-comparison subjects was examined in childhood and adolescence. Based on interviews with the parents of the subjects and with the children and adolescents themselves, subjects at risk for schizophrenia had poorer overall social competence than subjects at risk for affective disorder and comparison subjects in early adolescence and adolescence but not in childhood. In analyses of specific aspects of social competence, the adolescents at risk for schizophrenia had significantly poorer peer relationships and decreased hobbies/interests than the adolescents at risk for affective disorder and the normal-comparison adolescents. With respect to school adjustment, however, the two groups of adolescent offspring of parents with psychiatric disorders had significantly poorer adjustment than the comparison adolescents but did not differ from each other on this measure. These results suggest that various aspects of poor social competence may precede the onset of schizophrenia and play an important role in its development.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1994

No relation between risk of schizophrenia and prenatal exposure to influenza in Holland.

The authors compared the risk of schizophrenia in Dutch birth cohorts that were or were not exposed during the second trimester of gestation to the 1957 A2 influenza epidemic. Exposed birth cohorts did not have a higher risk of schizophrenia. These findings suggest that, in some populations, there is no relation between prenatal exposure to influenza and risk of schizophrenia.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

The New York High-Risk Project: anhedonia, attentional deviance, and psychopathology.

In the New York High-Risk Project (NYHRP) we followed subjects at risk for schizophrenic or affective disorders and low-risk controls from childhood to adulthood, with the goal of identifying early predictors of later schizophrenia-related psychopathology. In this article, we focus on two potential predictors: the Physical Anhedonia Scale administered in adolescence and the Attention Deviance Index obtained in childhood. Subjects of this report are 161 members of the NYHRP's first sample (sample A), who had scores on both attention and anhedonia and had followup clinical assessments in adulthood. We used a path analysis model and several separate regression analyses to examine the relationships of the parent diagnostic groups, attentional dysfunction, and anhedonia to each other and to each of three psychopathological outcomes: schizophrenia and schizophrenia-related psychoses, major affective disorder, and social isolation in nonpsychotic subjects. Subject groups did not differ in anhedonia scores but did differ in childhood attentional dysfunction, psychosis, and social isolation, all of which are more common in subjects at risk for schizophrenia. In these subjects at risk for schizophrenia, but not in the other two groups of subjects, childhood attentional dysfunction is related to anhedonia, social isolation, and possibly nonparanoid psychosis. Anhedonia is associated with social isolation and with psychosis in females. Several other gender effects are also noted.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1993

Childhood precursors of affective vs. social deficits in adolescents at risk for schizophrenia.

Childhood attentional and neuromotor precursors of social competence and affective deficits in adolescents at risk for schizophrenia, adolescents at risk for affective disorder, and matched comparison adolescents were examined. The subjects were offspring of parents with schizophrenia or affective disorder and of normal parents matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status from the New York High-Risk Project (Sample B). On the basis of interviews conducted when the subjects were children and adolescents, social competence was rated from child reports and parent reports, affective deficits were assessed by affective flattening ratings, and smiling was assessed by counting broad smiles. Adolescents at risk for schizophrenia had significantly greater social and affective deficits than adolescents at risk for affective disorder and comparison adolescents. In subjects at risk for schizophrenia, childhood neuromotor dysfunction predicted adolescent affective flattening, and childhood attentional dysfunction predicted adolescent social deficits. The results suggest that affective and social deficits in schizophrenia have different childhood precursors.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1992

A summary of attentional findings in the New York High-Risk Project.

We summarize here our findings with respect to attentional impairment among offspring of schizophrenic, affectively ill, and normal parents followed from childhood to adulthood during the two decades of the New York High-Risk Project (NYHRP). We review our data first, on childhood attentional performance in each of our two independent samples of such subjects and, second, on the relationship of early dysfunctions observed in this domain to psychopathological outcomes in adolescence and adulthood. Our cumulative results contribute strong support to the contention that global attentional dysfunctions may be viewed as a biobehavioral marker for the genetic liability to schizophrenic disorders.

Adolescent↗