A unique group of 175 patients experiencing their first lifetime episode of psychosis has been gather. And an attempt was made to recruit every case of first-episode psychosis that appeared in metropolitan Vancouver, Canada, over a two and one half year time span. The project focus was on psychosocial and biological factors associated with schizophrenia and the course of illness. Follow-up data are available at 9 months, 18 months, and then 5 years after initial illness. The data include measures that tap an array of psychosocial characteristics, putative psychophysiological markers of genetic vulnerability to schizophrenia, brain morphology, family history, premorbid personality, treatment history, and detailed clinical diagnostic data. Comparative data are available on a group of normal control subjects (n =141) recruited from the same community. To evaluate the potential of the psychophysiological measures as markers of schizophrenia, all available first-degree relatives of the first-episode psychotic patients and the normal subjects were also recruited. There is no data set comparable to this anywhere else and it is unlikely to replicated. While a number of publications have emerged based on this study, the rich data provide exciting opportunities to explore the interaction between biological and psychosocial factors in predicting the course of a baffling, disabling, and socially wasteful illness.
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