Childhood trauma is associated with a specific admixture of affective, anxiety, and psychosis symptoms cutting across traditional diagnostic boundaries

Abstract

Childhood trauma increases the likelihood of a specific admixture of affective, anxiety and psychotic symptoms cutting across traditional diagnostic boundaries, and this admixture may already be present in the earliest stages of psychopathology. These findings may have significant aetiological, pathophysiological, diagnostic and clinical repercussions.

The neural diathesis-stress model of schizophrenia revisited: An update on recent findings considering illness stage and neurobiological and methodological complexities

“…Other research suggests that childhood trauma particularly affects positive and dysthymia symptoms (Ruby et al, 2015) and that patients who have experienced childhood trauma show delayed symptom remission (Aas et al, 2016). Of course, the adverse effects of childhood trauma are not specific to psychosis, and victims of childhood trauma show a range of symptoms and syndromes (van Nierop et al, 2014, Gibson et al, 2016.…”

Psychotic experiences and incident suicidal ideation and behaviour: Disentangling the longitudinal associations from connected psychopathology

“…In each prospective cohort, a continuous symptom scale was constructed for depression, anxiety and mania symptoms at baseline by summing the subject's binary scores of the individual items of the respective CIDI sections, thus generating a continuous scale for each symptom domain (van Nierop et al, 2015a;van Nierop et al, 2015b). The section on depression included 27 symptoms in EDSP, 19 symptoms in NEMESIS and 24 symptoms in NEMESIS-2.…”

“…Finally, to assess whether co-occurrence of various symptom domains next to PE increased the risk of suicidal ideation and behaviour in a dose-response fashion in participants without baseline mental disorders, a logistic regression model was used with a categorical predictor variable containing the following categories (van Nierop et al, 2015a;van Nierop et al, 2015b): (1) No PE and no anxiety, depression or mania symptoms, (2) PE but no anxiety, depression or mania symptoms, (3) PE and one symptom dimension (anxiety, depression or mania) present, (4) PE and two symptom dimensions present, (5) PE and three symptom dimensions present.…”

“…Moreover, individuals with PE without a mental disorder are at increased risk to develop one (Kaymaz et al, 2012;Kelleher et al, 2012b;Linscott and van Os, 2013). Therefore, it remains unclear whether there is a specific association between PE and suicidal behaviour or whether the association reflects the increased risk of suicidal behaviour in more severe states of mental distress associated with multidimensional psychopathology (Guloksuz et al, 2015;van Nierop et al, 2015b). In a previous study, PE were only associated with suicide attempts in individuals with associated psychological distress, while in the absence of psychological distress there was no association (Martin et al, 2015).…”

The role of cognitive functioning in the relationship between childhood trauma and a mixed phenotype of affective-anxious-psychotic symptoms in psychotic disorders

“…Recent studies have also shown that PD patients with a history of CT, compared with their non-exposed counterparts, display a phenotype composed of an admixture of affective, anxious, and psychotic symptoms, rather than of any of these symptom clusters in isolation (Van Nierop et al, 2015). A follow-up study showed that the co-occurrence of CT and this mixed phenotype of affective, anxious, and psychotic symptoms (CT/MP) is associated with clinically and functionally meaningful differences within PD patients (Van Nierop et al, 2016).…”