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First Symptoms of Psychosis Evident in 12-Year-Olds

Children normally experience flights of fancy, including imaginary friends and conversations with stuffed animals, but some of them are also having hallucinations and delusions which may be early signs of psychosis.
  
A study of British 12-year-olds that asked whether they had ever seen things or heard voices that weren't really there, and then asked careful follow-up questions, has found that nearly 6% may be showing at least one definite symptom of psychosis.
  
The children who exhibited these symptoms had many of the same risk factors that are known to correlate with adult schizophrenia, including genetic, social, neurodevelopmental, home-rearing and behavioral risks.
  
"We don't want to be unduly alarmist, but this is also not something to dismiss," says coauthor Terrie Moffitt, PhD, the Knut Schmidt Nielsen professor of psychology and neuroscience and psychiatry  behavioral sciences at Duke University. The study appears in the Archives of General Psychiatry.
 
The children were participants in the long-term Environmental Risk Longitudinal Twin Study in Britain, which includes 2,232 children who have been tracked since the age of 5 and reassessed at 7, 10, and 12.
 
The British study is an outgrowth of research that the same group did earlier with a long-term cohort in Dunedin, New Zealand. At age 11, those children were asked about psychotic symptoms, but the researchers waited 15 years to see how, as adults, their symptoms matched what they reported at 11. By age 26, one half of the people who self-reported symptoms at age 11 were found to be psychotic as adults.
  
"It looks like a nontrivial minority of children report these symptoms," says coauthor Avshalom Caspi, PhD, the Edward M. Arnett professor of psychology and neuroscience and psychiatry  behavioral sciences at Duke.
 
Psychotic symptoms in childhood also can be a marker of impaired developmental processes, and are something caregivers should look for, Moffitt says. "There is not much you can do except monitoring and surveillance," she says. "But we feel we should be alerting clinicians that there's a minority to pay attention to."
  
Source: National Institutes of Health