AI pinpoints where psychosis originates in the brain

New brain scans from people with psychosis may confirm a long-standing theory as to why people experience these sudden breaks from reality.

The theory states that, in psychosis, brain networks in charge of directing a person's attention malfunction. This causes a person to experience hallucinations, or sensations of things that aren't actually happening; and delusions, or unshakable false beliefs. Psychosis is a feature of serious mental disorders such as schizophrenia, but its symptoms exist on a continuum and can also occur independently of any defined mental disorder.

The precise details of what happens in the brain to cause psychosis have long eluded scientists. One reason for this is that psychosis is often studied in people who have long been taking antipsychotic medications, so it's difficult to distinguish brain changes tied to the condition from those linked to the drugs.

A goal of the new brain-scan study, published April 11 in the journal Molecular Psychiatry, was to pinpoint the underlying mechanisms involved in psychosis from an early age, which could help pave the way to earlier diagnoses and better treatments.

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"The abnormalities do not start when you are in your 20s; they are evident even when you are 7 or 8," lead study author Kaustubh Supekar, a clinical associate professor of psychiatry and behavioral Sciences at Stanford University School of Medicine, said in a statement.

To spot these abnormalities, the study focused on people ages 6 to 39 with a rare genetic condition associated with psychosis, called 22q11.2 deletion syndrome. People with the syndrome are missing part of one of their copies of chromosome 22. In addition to having a risk of other conditions — such as heart abnormalities, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and autism — those affected with the syndrome have a roughly 30% chance of experiencing psychosis, schizophrenia or both.