Overlooking the transition elephant in the ultra-high-risk room: are we missing functional equivalents of transition to psychosis?

Abstract

AbstractIn the wake of the almost quarter of a century since the conceptualization of ultra-high-risk (UHR) states for psychosis, empirical evidences in the field are constantly scrutinized and re-assessed through meta-analytic lens. Briefly, such scrutiny converges on three major evidences: pretest risk enrichment, risk hierarchy within UHR states, and declining transition rates. While the former two are intuitive, the dilution effect remains elusive and might be rather symptomatic of unsolved issues in the field. Those include the heterogeneously reported antipsychotic (AP) exposure in UHR samples and the almost univocal focus on purely psychometric transition to psychosis. Both issues lead to the neglect of functional equivalents of transition, i.e. that of a mental state at immediate need for AP medication, and might have a cascading confounding effect on the predictive value of contemporary risk calculators centered on criterial transition as a unique outcome.