title: Metabolic profiling of CSF: evidence that early intervention may impact on disease progression and outcome in schizophrenia.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  The identification of schizophrenia biomarkers is a crucial step towards improving current diagnosis, developing new presymptomatic treatments, identifying high-risk individuals and disease subgroups, and assessing the efficacy of preventative interventions at a rate that is not currently possible.
  
  
  RESULTS
  (1)H nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy in conjunction with computerized pattern recognition analysis were employed to investigate metabolic profiles of a total of 152 cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) samples from drug-naïve or minimally treated patients with first-onset paranoid schizophrenia (referred to as "schizophrenia" in the following text) and healthy controls. Partial least square discriminant analysis showed a highly significant separation of patients with first-onset schizophrenia away from healthy controls. Short-term treatment with antipsychotic medication resulted in a normalization of the disease signature in over half the patients, well before overt clinical improvement. No normalization was observed in patients in which treatment had not been initiated at first presentation, providing the first molecular evidence for the importance of early intervention for psychotic disorders. Furthermore, the alterations identified in drug-naïve patients could be validated in a test sample set achieving a sensitivity and specificity of 82% and 85%, respectively.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our findings suggest brain-specific alterations in glucoregulatory processes in the CSF of drug-naïve patients with first-onset schizophrenia, implying that these abnormalities are intrinsic to the disease, rather than a side effect of antipsychotic medication. Short-term treatment with atypical antipsychotic medication resulted in a normalization of the CSF disease signature in half the patients well before a clinical improvement would be expected. Furthermore, our results suggest that the initiation of antipsychotic treatment during a first psychotic episode may influence treatment response and/or outcome.
authors.affiliation: Biological Chemistry, Biomedical Sciences Division, Faculty of Medicine, Imperial College, London, United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Elaine
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Holmes
authors.forename: Tsz M
authors.initials: TM
authors.lastname: Tsang
authors.forename: Jeffrey T-J
authors.initials: JT
authors.lastname: Huang
authors.forename: F Markus
authors.initials: FM
authors.lastname: Leweke
authors.forename: Dagmar
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Koethe
authors.forename: Christoph W
authors.initials: CW
authors.lastname: Gerth
authors.forename: Brit M
authors.initials: BM
authors.lastname: Nolden
authors.forename: Sonja
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Gross
authors.forename: Daniela
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Schreiber
authors.forename: Jeremy K
authors.initials: JK
authors.lastname: Nicholson
authors.forename: Sabine
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Bahn
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D017668:Age of Onset; D014150:Antipsychotic Agents / Q000494:pharmacology; D001786:Blood Glucose / Q000378:metabolism; D002555:Cerebrospinal Fluid / Q000187:drug effects / Q000378:metabolism*; D003710:Demography; D018450:Disease Progression; D005260:Female; D005947:Glucose / Q000134:cerebrospinal fluid; D006801:Humans; D008297:Male; D019906:Nuclear Magnetic Resonance, Biomolecular; D015203:Reproducibility of Results; D012559:Schizophrenia / Q000453:epidemiology / Q000628:therapy*; D016896:Treatment Outcome
chemical_list: D014150:Antipsychotic Agents; D001786:Blood Glucose; D005947:Glucose