Familial Schizophrenia and Spectrum Personality Disorders

Study Summary

We propose to recruit 150 case families (i.e., families with a schizophrenia proband), 150 control families, and 45 control subjects who exhibit schizophrenia spectrum personality symptoms in the absence of a family history of schizophrenia. Participants will undergo a number of clinical, electrophysiological, perceptual, and cognitive assessments. These data will be used to identify phenotypes likely to be associated with genetic risk for schizophrenia, and to determine how these phenotypes aggregate in families. Some of the analyses will focus on examining associations between candidate genes and these alternative phenotypes. Thus if we are not able to recruit relatives we may still collect these phenotypic data in probands and their genetic sample for future genotype/phenotype association studies. Testing procedures require a 10-12 hour time commitment and testing will be completed over 2 or more days. Participants will be asked to give a blood (or saliva if difficult to obtain blood sample for instance because of fear of blood draws), which will be stored for future genetic analyses.