The primary goal of the Prevention Research Program is to provide prodromal participants with a structured, high quality clinical care setting within which the Center research can take place. The objectives of this core are to recruit patients with prodromal symptoms and demographically comparable healthy controls, to conduct diagnostic and screening evaluations of potential participants to determine study eligibility and to coordinate their participation in the Center’s projects.

Prevention Research Program Investigators include, Tyrone Cannon, Ph.D., Mary O’Brien, Ph.D., Carrie Bearden, Ph.D., Melita Daley, M.D., Joseph Pierre, M.D., Alex Kopelowicz, M.D.

For more detailed information about the Prevention Research Program please visit www.capps.ucla.edu.

Findings

At the inception of the Prodromal Research Program, very little was known about the psychosis prodrome. The initial set of publications from the Prodromal Resarch Program focused on phenomenological aspects of the psychosis prodrome (Meyer et al. 2005; Niendam et al. 2007), and continuity with first episode schizophrenia in terms of symptomatology (Willhite et al. 2008) and cognition (Niendam et al. 2006). In collaboration with other researchers in this field, we developed a new measure of social and role functioning that is better suited for use in adolescent populations (Cornblatt et al. 2007). Recently, we have taken advantage of our prospectively collected longitudinal data to examine neurobiological (Karlsgodt et al. 2008; Sabb et al., submitted; Sanz et al., submitted), cognitive (Niendam et al. 2007) and clinical (Niendam et al., submitted) predictors of functional outcome and conversion to psychosis in this at-risk population. A parallel set of studies has focused on family factors that predict outcome in at-risk youth (OBrien et al., 2007; OBrien et al., under review).