Abstract
Multiscale neuroscience conceptualizes mental illness as arising from aberrant interactions across and within multiple biopsychosocial scales. We leverage this framework to propose a multiscale disease progression model of psychosis, in which hippocampal-cortical dysconnectivity precedes impairments in episodic memory and social cognition, which lead to more severe negative symptoms and lower functional outcome. As psychosis represents a heterogeneous collection of biological and behavioral alterations that evolve over time, we further predict this disease progression for a subtype of the patient sample, with other patients showing normal-range performance on all variables. We sampled data from two cross-sectional datasets of first- and multi-episode psychosis, resulting in a sample of 163 patients and 119 non-clinical controls. To address our proposed disease progression model and evaluate potential heterogeneity, we applied a machine-learning algorithm, SuStaIn, to the patient data. SuStaIn uniquely integrates clustering and disease progression modeling and identified three patient subtypes. Subtype 0 showed normal-range performance on all variables. In comparison, Subtype 1 showed lower episodic memory, social cognition, functional outcome, and higher negative symptoms, while Subtype 2 showed lower hippocampal-cortical connectivity and episodic memory. Subtype 1 deteriorated from episodic memory to social cognition, negative symptoms, functional outcome to bilateral hippocampal-cortical dysconnectivity, while Subtype 2 deteriorated from bilateral hippocampal-cortical dysconnectivity to episodic memory and social cognition, functional outcome to negative symptoms. This first application of SuStaIn in a multiscale psychiatric model provides distinct disease trajectories of hippocampal-cortical connectivity, which might underlie the heterogeneous behavioral manifestations of psychosis.
This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution
Access options
Subscribe to this journal
Receive 12 print issues and online access
$259.00 per year
only $21.58 per issue
Buy this article
- Purchase on Springer Link
- Instant access to full article PDF
Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout
Similar content being viewed by others
Data availability
The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are not publicly available due to containing sensitive patient information but are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.
Code availability
The code for the steps of data preparation and SuStaIn has been made publicly available on GitHub (https://github.com/janatotzek/2023-multiscale-markers-psychosis).
References
American Psychiatric Association. Diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders: DSM-5. 5th ed. American Psychiatric Association; 2013.
Heinrichs RW, Zakzanis KK. Neurocognitive deficit in schizophrenia: a quantitative review of the evidence. Neuropsychology. 1998;12:426.
Sommer IE, Bearden CE, Van Dellen E, Breetvelt EJ, Duijff SN, Maijer K, et al. Early interventions in risk groups for schizophrenia: what are we waiting for? NPJ Schizophr. 2016;2:1–9.
Bora E, Lin A, Wood S, Yung A, McGorry P, Pantelis C. Cognitive deficits in youth with familial and clinical high risk to psychosis: a systematic review and meta‐analysis. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2014;130:1–15.
Vos T, Abajobir AA, Abate KH, Abbafati C, Abbas KM, Abd-Allah F, et al. Global, regional, and national incidence, prevalence, and years lived with disability for 328 diseases and injuries for 195 countries, 1990–2016: a systematic analysis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2016. Lancet. 2017;390:1211–59.
Goldman HH, Skodol AE, Lave TR. Revising axis V for DSM-IV: a review of measures of social functioning. Am J Psychiatry. 1992;149:1148–56.
Lepage M, Bodnar M, Bowie CR. Neurocognition: clinical and functional outcomes in schizophrenia. Can J Psychiatry. 2014;59:5–12.
Chong HY, Teoh SL, Wu DB-C, Kotirum S, Chiou C-F, Chaiyakunapruk N. Global economic burden of schizophrenia: a systematic review. Neuropsychiatr Dis Treat. 2016;12:357.
Wu EQ, Birnbaum HG, Shi L, Ball DE, Kessler RC, Moulis M, et al. The economic burden of schizophrenia in the United States in 2002. J Clin Psychiatry. 2005;66:1122–9.
van den Heuvel MP, Scholtens LH, Kahn RS. Multiscale neuroscience of psychiatric disorders. Biol Psychiatry. 2019;86:512–22.
Lavigne KM, Kanagasabai K, Palaniyappan L. Ultra-high field neuroimaging in psychosis: a narrative review. Front Psychiatry. 2022;13:994372.
Mišić B, Goñi J, Betzel RF, Sporns O, McIntosh AR. A network convergence zone in the hippocampus. PLoS Comput Biol. 2014;10:e1003982.
Evans AC. Networks of anatomical covariance. Neuroimage. 2013;80:489–504.
Bullmore E, Sporns O. Complex brain networks: graph theoretical analysis of structural and functional systems. Nat Rev Neurosci. 2009;10:186–98.
Makowski C, Lewis JD, Khundrakpam B, Tardif CL, Palaniyappan L, Joober R, et al. Altered hippocampal centrality and dynamic anatomical covariance of intracortical microstructure in first episode psychosis. Hippocampus. 2020;30:1058–72.
Yeo BT, Krienen FM, Sepulcre J, Sabuncu MR, Lashkari D, Hollinshead M, et al. The organization of the human cerebral cortex estimated by intrinsic functional connectivity. J Neurophysiol. 2011;106:1125–65.
Valli I, Tognin S, Fusar-Poli P, Mechelli A. Episodic memory dysfunction in individuals at high-risk of psychosis: a systematic review of neuropsychological and neurofunctional studies. Curr Pharm Des. 2012;18:443–58.
Mesholam-Gately RI, Giuliano AJ, Goff KP, Faraone SV, Seidman LJ. Neurocognition in first-episode schizophrenia: a meta-analytic review. Neuropsychology. 2009;23:315.
Raucher-Chéné D, Thibaudeau E, Sauvé G, Lavigne KM, Lepage M. Understanding others as a mediator between verbal memory and negative symptoms in schizophrenia-spectrum disorder. J Psychiatr Res. 2021;143:429–35.
Buck G, Lavigne KM, Makowski C, Joober R, Malla A, Lepage M. Sex differences in verbal memory predict functioning through negative symptoms in early psychosis. Schizophr Bull. 2020;46:1587–95.
Lin CH, Huang CL, Chang YC, Chen PW, Lin CY, Tsai GE. Clinical symptoms, mainly negative symptoms, mediate the influence of neurocognition and social cognition on functional outcome of schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2013;146:231–7.
Kharawala S, Hastedt C, Podhorna J, Shukla H, Kappelhoff B, Harvey PD. The relationship between cognition and functioning in schizophrenia: a semi-systematic review. Schizophr Res Cognit. 2022;27:100217.
Devoe DJ, Braun A, Seredynski T, Addington J. Negative symptoms and functioning in youth at risk of psychosis: a systematic review and meta-analysis. Harv Rev Psychiatry. 2020;28:341.
Milev P, Ho B-C, Arndt S, Andreasen NC. Predictive values of neurocognition and negative symptoms on functional outcome in schizophrenia: a longitudinal first-episode study with 7-year follow-up. Am J Psychiatry. 2005;162:495–506.
Young AL, Marinescu RV, Oxtoby NP, Bocchetta M, Yong K, Firth NC, et al. Uncovering the heterogeneity and temporal complexity of neurodegenerative diseases with Subtype and Stage Inference. Nat Commun. 2018;9:1–16.
Green MJ, Girshkin L, Kremerskothen K, Watkeys O, Quidé Y. A systematic review of studies reporting data-driven cognitive subtypes across the psychosis spectrum. Neuropsychol Rev. 2020;30:446–60.
Rocca P, Galderisi S, Rossi A, Bertolino A, Rucci P, Gibertoni D, et al. Social cognition in people with schizophrenia: a cluster-analytic approach. Psychol Med. 2016;46:2717–29.
Strauss GP, Horan WP, Kirkpatrick B, Fischer BA, Keller WR, Miski P, et al. Deconstructing negative symptoms of schizophrenia: avolition–apathy and diminished expression clusters predict clinical presentation and functional outcome. J Psychiatr Res. 2013;47:783–90.
Sauvé G, Malla A, Joober R, Brodeur MB, Lepage M. Comparing cognitive clusters across first-and multiple-episode of psychosis. Psychiatry Res. 2018;269:707–18.
Uren J, Cotton SM, Killackey E, Saling MM, Allott K. Cognitive clusters in first-episode psychosis: overlap with healthy controls and relationship to concurrent and prospective symptoms and functioning. Neuropsychology. 2017;31:787.
Lewandowski K, Sperry S, Cohen B, Öngür D. Cognitive variability in psychotic disorders: a cross-diagnostic cluster analysis. Psychol Med. 2014;44:3239–48.
Young AL, Bocchetta M, Russell LL, Convery RS, Peakman G, Todd E, et al. Characterizing the clinical features and atrophy patterns of MAPT-related frontotemporal dementia with disease progression modeling. Neurology. 2021;97:e941–e52.
Young AL, Vogel JW, Aksman LM, Wijeratne PA, Eshaghi A, Oxtoby NP, et al. Ordinal SuStaIn: subtype and stage inference for clinical scores, visual ratings, and other ordinal data. Front Artif Intell. 2021;4:613261.
Vogel JW, Young AL, Oxtoby NP, Smith R, Ossenkoppele R, Strandberg OT, et al. Four distinct trajectories of tau deposition identified in Alzheimer’s disease. Nat Med. 2021;27:871–81.
Oxtoby NP, Leyland L-A, Aksman LM, Thomas GE, Bunting EL, Wijeratne PA, et al. Sequence of clinical and neurodegeneration events in Parkinson’s disease progression. Brain. 2021;144:975–88.
Fiford CM, Sudre CH, Young AL, Macdougall A, Nicholas J, Manning EN, et al. Presumed small vessel disease, imaging and cognition markers in the Alzheimer’s disease neuroimaging initiative. Brain Commun. 2021;3:fcab226.
Firth NC, Primativo S, Brotherhood E, Young AL, Yong KX, Crutch SJ, et al. Sequences of cognitive decline in typical Alzheimer’s disease and posterior cortical atrophy estimated using a novel event‐based model of disease progression. Alzheimer’s Dement. 2020;16:965–73.
Jiang Y, Wang J, Zhou E, Palaniyappan L, Luo C, Ji G, et al. Neuroimaging biomarkers define neurophysiological subtypes with distinct trajectories in schizophrenia. Nat Mental Health. 2023;1:186–99.
Sone D, Young A, Shinagawa S, Tsugawa S, Iwata Y, Tarumi R, et al. Disease progression patterns of brain morphology in schizophrenia: More progressed stages in treatment-resistance. Schizophr Bull. 2024;50:393–402.
McGorry PD, Purcell R, Hickie IB, Yung AR, Pantelis C, Jackson HJ. Clinical staging: a heuristic model for psychiatry and youth mental health. Med J Aust. 2007;187:S40–S2.
Shah JL, Scott J, McGorry PD, Cross SP, Keshavan MS, Nelson B, et al. Transdiagnostic clinical staging in youth mental health: a first international consensus statement. World Psychiatry. 2020;19:233–42.
Béland S, Lepage M. The relative contributions of social cognition and self-reflectiveness to clinical insight in enduring schizophrenia. Psychiatry Res. 2017;258:116–23.
Iyer S, Jordan G, MacDonald K, Joober R, Malla A. Early intervention for psychosis: a Canadian perspective. J Nerv Mental Dis. 2015;203:356–64.
First MB, Spitzer RL, Gibbon M, Williams JBW. Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-IV-TR Axis I Disorders, Research Version, Patient Edition (SCID-I/P). New York, NY: Biometrics Research; 2010.
First MB, Williams JBW, Karg RS, Spitzer RL. Structured clinical interview for DSM-5—Research version (SCID-5-RV). Arlington, VA: American Psychiatric Association; 2015.
Pietrzak RH, Olver J, Norman T, Piskulic D, Maruff P, Snyder PJ. A comparison of the CogState schizophrenia battery and the measurement and treatment research to improve cognition in schizophrenia (MATRICS) battery in assessing cognitive impairment in chronic schizophrenia. J Clin Exp Neuropsychol. 2009;31:848–59.
Addington D, Addington J, Maticka-Tyndale E. Assessing depression in schizophrenia: the Calgary Depression Scale. Br J Psychiatry. 1993;163:39–44.
Andreasen NC. The scale for the assessment of negative symptoms (SANS): conceptual and theoretical foundations. Br J Psychiatry. 1983;155:49–52.
Andreasen NC. The scale for the assessment of positive symptoms (SAPS). Br J Psychiatry. 1984;155:49–52.
Morosini PL, Magliano L, Brambilla L, Ugolini S, Pioli R. Development, reliability and acceptability of a new version of the DSM‐IV Social and Occupational Functioning Assessment Scale (SOFAS) to assess routine social funtioning. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2000;101:323–9.
Ad-Dab’bagh Y, Lyttelton O, Muehlboeck J, Lepage C, Einarson D, et al. The CIVET image-processing environment: a fully automated comprehensive pipeline for anatomical neuroimaging research. In Proc: of the 12th annual meeting of the organization for human brain mapping; Florence, Italy: 2006.
Chakravarty MM, Steadman P, Van Eede MC, Calcott RD, Gu V, Shaw P, et al. Performing label‐fusion‐based segmentation using multiple automatically generated templates. Hum Brain Mapp. 2013;34:2635–54.
Pipitone J, Park MTM, Winterburn J, Lett TA, Lerch JP, Pruessner JC, et al. Multi-atlas segmentation of the whole hippocampus and subfields using multiple automatically generated templates. Neuroimage. 2014;101:494–512.
Ajnakina O, Das T, Lally J, Di Forti M, Pariante CM, Marques TR, et al. Structural covariance of cortical gyrification at illness onset in treatment resistance: a longitudinal study of first-episode psychoses. Schizophr Bull. 2021;47:1729–39.
Das T, Borgwardt S, Hauke DJ, Harrisberger F, Lang UE, Riecher-Rössler A, et al. Disorganized gyrification network properties during the transition to psychosis. JAMA Psychiatry. 2018;75:613–22.
Rubinov M, Sporns O. Complex network measures of brain connectivity: uses and interpretations. Neuroimage. 2010;52:1059–69.
Agid O, McDonald K, Siu C, Tsoutsoulas C, Wass C, Zipursky RB, et al. Happiness in first-episode schizophrenia. Schizophr Res. 2012;141:98–103.
Oruç S, Gülseren G, Kusbec O, Özbulut O. An evaluation of neuropsychiatric symptoms in Parkinson’s disease patients. Niger J Clin Pract. 2017;20:900–4.
Aksman LM, Wijeratne PA, Oxtoby NP, Eshaghi A, Shand C, Altmann A, et al. pySuStaIn: a Python implementation of the subtype and stage inference algorithm. SoftwareX. 2021;16:100811.
UCL-Pond. SuStaIn tutorial using simulated data GitHub. 2021. https://github.com/ucl-pond/pySuStaIn/blob/master/notebooks/SuStaIn%20tutorial%20using%20simulated%20data.ipynb.
Jáni M, Kašpárek T. Emotion recognition and theory of mind in schizophrenia: a meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies. World J Biol Psychiatry. 2018;19:S86–S96.
Guimond S, Mothi SS, Makowski C, Chakravarty MM, Keshavan MS. Altered amygdala shape trajectories and emotion recognition in youth at familial high risk of schizophrenia who develop psychosis. Transl Psychiatry. 2022;12:1–8.
Makowski C, Bodnar M, Shenker J, Malla A, Joober R, Chakravarty M, et al. Linking persistent negative symptoms to amygdala–hippocampus structure in first-episode psychosis. Transl Psychiatry. 2017;7:e1195.
Addington J, Addington D. Patterns of premorbid functioning in first episode psychosis: relationship to 2‐year outcome. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2005;112:40–6.
Bucci P, Galderisi S, Mucci A, Rossi A, Rocca P, Bertolino A, et al. Premorbid academic and social functioning in patients with schizophrenia and its associations with negative symptoms and cognition. Acta Psychiatr Scand. 2018;138:253–66.
Ventura J, Subotnik KL, Gitlin MJ, Gretchen-Doorly D, Ered A, Villa KF, et al. Negative symptoms and functioning during the first year after a recent onset of schizophrenia and 8 years later. Schizophr Res. 2015;161:407–13.
Campbell S, MacQueen G. The role of the hippocampus in the pathophysiology of major depression. J Psychiatry Neurosci. 2004;29:417–26.
Jayaweera H, Hickie I, Duffy S, Mowszowski L, Norrie L, Lagopoulos J, et al. Episodic memory in depression: the unique contribution of the anterior caudate and hippocampus. Psychol Med. 2016;46:2189–99.
Pelizza L, Leuci E, Quattrone E, Azzali S, Paulillo G, Pupo S, et al. Depressive features in individuals with first episode psychosis: psychopathological and treatment considerations from a 2-year follow-up study. Clin Neuropsychiatry. 2023;20:39.
Lepage M, Bodnar M, Raucher-Chéné D, Lavigne KM, Makowski C, Joober R, et al. Neurocognitive functions in persistent negative symptoms following a first episode of psychosis. Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2021;47:86–97.
Acknowledgements
We would like to thank all participants who took part in the two studies which contributed to our project. We would also like to thank PEPP-Montréal and the CRISP Research Lab of the Douglas Research Centre for participant recruitment and data collection. We would also like to thank Caroline Dakoure and Joshua Unrau for their support with data preparation and Karyne Anselmo for her help with reconstructing the SOFAS. A special thank you also goes to Alan C. Evans for early methodological guidance. We used the high-performance computing resources available via the Digital Research Alliance of Canada (https://alliancecan.ca/en).
Funding
Funding Study 1 was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research in collaboration with the Otsuka Lundbeck Alliance (#141636), while Study 2 was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (#106434) and the Otsuka/Lundbeck Alliance (#20135257). This research was undertaken thanks in part to funding from the Canada First Research Excellence Fund and Fonds de recherche du Québec, awarded to the Healthy Brains, Healthy Lives initiative at McGill University. The funding agencies did not influence the study design, data collection or writing of the manuscript.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Contributions
Conceptualization: ML, KML, JFT. Supervision: ML, KML, DH. Writing—Original Draft: JFT. Formal analysis: JFT. Writing—Review & Editing: JFT, KML, RJ, AM, JLS, ML, DH, ALY, DR. Software: JFT, KML, ALY, MMC. Methodology: JFT, KML, ALY. Visualization: JFT. Funding Acquisition: ML, MMC, RJ, AM, JLS.
Corresponding author
Ethics declarations
Competing interests
ML holds salary awards through the James McGill Professorship and reports grants from Otsuka Lundbeck Alliance, Hoffman-La Roche, personal fees from Lundbeck Canada, personal fees from Otsuka Canada, personal fees from Boehringer-Ingelheim, grants and personal fees from Janssen outside the submitted work. KML reports personal fees from Otsuka Canada, Lundbeck Canada, and Boehringer Ingelheim. DH has received financial compensation as a consultant for P1vitalProducts Ltd. These activities were unrelated to the work presented in this manuscript. JLS holds a salary award from the Fonds de recherche du Québec—Santé. AM reports receipt of grants, fees or honoraria from Lundbeck and Otsuka and salary awards by the Canada Research Chairs program. MMC holds salary awards from the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Santé and reports funding from the Canadian Institute of Health Research, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, the Weston Brain Institute, Healthy Brains Healthy Lives, and the Fonds de Recherche du Québec—Santé. RJ served as member of advisory board committees and speaker for Bristol Myers Squibb, Pfizer, Sunovian, Janssen, Myelin and Associates, Lundbeck, Otsuka, Shire, and Perdue, and received grants from Janssen, Otsuka, Lundbeck, Bristol Myers Squibb, Astra Zeneca, and HLS Therapeutics Inc. ALY was supported by a Skills Development Fellowship (MR/T027800/1) from the Medical Research Council and a Career Development Award from the Wellcome Trust [227341/Z/23/Z]. This research was funded in whole, or in part, by the Wellcome Trust [227341/Z/23/Z]. For the purpose of open access, the author has applied a CC BY public copyright license to any Author Accepted Manuscript version arising from this submission. JFT reports receipt of the Healthy Brains Healthy Lives Graduate Student Fellowship. All of these disclosures are unrelated to the present study.
Additional information
Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Supplementary information
Rights and permissions
Springer Nature or its licensor (e.g. a society or other partner) holds exclusive rights to this article under a publishing agreement with the author(s) or other rightsholder(s); author self-archiving of the accepted manuscript version of this article is solely governed by the terms of such publishing agreement and applicable law.
About this article
Cite this article
Totzek, J.F., Chakravarty, M.M., Joober, R. et al. Longitudinal inference of multiscale markers in psychosis: from hippocampal centrality to functional outcome. Mol Psychiatry (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02549-x
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41380-024-02549-x