Identifying Individuals at Clinical High Risk of Psychosis in Different Cultures and Countries

With rapid progress being made around the world in the identification of individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis, there is now hope that serious psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia can be prevented with early intervention strategies. There are at least three notably large samples have been described in the literature in last decade, the most representative example such as the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study (NAPLS). An important question, for example, is how the CHR concept will work in other parts of the world, which have different cultural and social backgrounds. There are many CHR projects are ongoing around world. For example, the "ShangHai At Risk for Psychosis (SHARP)" project was launched at the Shanghai Mental Health Center (SMHC), the largest outpatient mental health clinic in China; the project CCM2013 funded by the Italian National Center for Disease and Prevention Control (in Italian, “Centro Nazionale per la Prevenzione e il Controllo delle Malattie).

The goal of this current Research Topic is to present the similarities and differences from clinical, cognitive, biological, cultural and social aspects between the sample from different cultures and countries. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to comparing the findings of CHR projects around world based on comparable datasets. The articles can be a systematic review, a meta-analysis, new data, or a data-driven conceptual piece or hypothesis. We encourage authors either are key investigators from CHR program or play important role in multiple projects. Authors will cover comprehensive CHR domains such as demographics, clinical characters, risk calculator, cognitive features, biomarkers in neuroimaging, biochemistry, genetics, cultural variability and so on.