B1276 - Behavioural and neurophysiological effects of schizophrenia risk genes - 08/12/2011
Aims:
1. To understand the effects of genetic variants contributing to schizophrenia risk on brain and behaviour.2. To break down this effects according to the affected biological pathways.
Hypotheses:
1. Risk variants associated with schizophrenia alone or jointly affect brain maturation, brain function and cognition.2. Risk variants clustering on specific biological pathways will affect neural and cognitive processes associated with these pathways.
Sample:
200 participants from ALSPAC without history of psychosis or other mental disorder (including substance misuse), neurological disorder or learning disability and selected to be extreme groups (100 high, 100 low, 50 male and female in each group) for polygenic scores of schizophrenia. Questionnaire data will be used to exclude psychiatric/ neurological history. Cognitive measures aged 8, 11, 15 will be used for comparison with assessments obtained through the project.