Centre for Clinical Research in Neuropsychiatry

We are studying the neurodevelopmental life course trajectory to schizophrenia in a whole-population cohort of children born 1980 to 2001, and analysing familial and environmental risk factors in the aetiology of the disease.

Through the use of record-linkage across long-standing administrative health and social services registers, we aim to understand the aetiology of schizophrenia through linked health data.

It has been reported more than once that schizophrenia is very rare among people with congenital and early acquired blindness, which is in contrast to frequent paranoid psychoses in people with acquired deafness.

Using the Pathways study’s linked databases, in which 500,000 Western Australian children were followed through to adulthood, we will review the psychiatric history of people with diagnoses of congenital blindness.

Our goal is to add evidence to the literature regarding congenital blindness and schizophrenia utilising the Health Department’s database.

This project involves a seven-year follow-up and 10-year retrospective analysis of 2075 Survey of High Impact Psychosis (SHIP) participants using linked mortality and health registers.

Physical disease and premature death are elevated in schizophrenia and cross-sectional data has revealed rates of physical morbidity among SHIP participants is well above population rates, resulting in a very high cost burden.

However, there is a critical need for longitudinal data. In this study, we will analyse 17 years (2000 to 2017) of mortality and physical morbidity outcome data from state and national administrative registers to estimate the rates of seven-year mortality and morbidity in people with a psychotic disorder.

The research will also look at the economic burden of severe and acute physical morbidity and the impact of risk factors on this population.

Accumulating evidence shows hallucinatory experiences are present at surprisingly high rates in healthy older adults, without signs of psychosis, dementia or delirium.

Stigma and misunderstanding of hallucinations, together with ageism, may lead to under-reporting of these experiences by older adults, and misdiagnosis or mismanagement by health and mental health practitioners.

This project aims to get a better understanding of the phenomenology, causes and consequences of hallucinations in healthy adults aged over 60 years to help improve aged care services and treatments.

This collaboration is focused on genes in the PTPN21-ErbB4/NRG3 pathway, which positively influence cortical neuronal survival and neuritic length.

Aberrant functioning of these genes has been implicated in schizophrenia susceptibility.

This study will investigate the association of genetic variants in the pathway to schizophrenia using The Western Australian Family Study of Schizophrenia case-control sample and available genome-wide association study data.

The role of these variants on quantitative neurocognitive endophenotypes in the sample will also be examined. The goal of the project is to understand the association between specific genes and the risk of developing schizophrenia.

This project is focused on understanding the Ubiquitin-Proteasome system (UPS) and its role in neurodegenerative disorders.

The study will be based on preliminary findings of ubiquitination in a small sample of clozapine-treated patients. The UPS is important in the degradation and modification of proteins and has been identified as an important target for the therapeutic treatment of neurodegenerative disorders, including schizophrenia.

This study will look at a whole-population cohort of children at familial high-risk for psychotic disorders, by exploring the role of stress, adversity and other socially mediated risk factors in the aetiology of schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders.

The study aims to:

• identify the extent of the contribution of social adversity to risk for psychotic illness
• examine the interplay between social adversity, genetic risk and other predictors of psychotic illness
• distinguish developmental trajectories to psychotic illness using available data on predisposing factors so as to identify modifiable targets amenable to intervention and prevention
• investigate the nature of individual resilience, distinguishing those who do not develop psychotic illness following exposure to social adversity from those who do

We will examine specificity for psychotic illness, rather than general mental illnesses.

Language and thought dysfunction are central features in schizophrenia but still poorly understood.

Improved understanding of language difficulties in schizophrenia may help to provide new directions for assessment and treatment.

This project aims to examine whether some of the root causes of language production problems are linked to both higher-level problems in action-related semantics and lower-level deficits in sensory-motor perception.