Researchers in the Mental Health Mission’s Early Psychosis workstream have developed a psychosis risk prediction tool which aims to help GPs detect the early signs of psychosis, potentially reducing the duration of untreated psychosis.
Psychosis is a serious, long-lasting mental illness. Symptoms include hallucinations and strange, fixed thoughts, called delusions.
The P-Risk study aimed to determine the feasibility and acceptability of using a clinical tool called ‘P-Risk’ that would help GPs identify people at risk of developing psychosis and refer them for specialist assessment and treatment.
The P-risk tool, developed by researchers at the University of Bristol, uses information stored in GPs medical records such as the number of GP appointments for a range of nonpsychotic mental health conditions such as depression, anxiety, sleep problems and socio-demographic information including age, sex and ethnicity.
The paper “External validation of a prognostic model to improve prediction of psychosis: a retrospective cohort study in primary care”, published in the British Journal of General Practice, suggests that the tool is accurate and therefore could help GPs identify at-risk individuals earlier, potentially leading to better outcomes through timely intervention.
Dr Sarah Sullivan, Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Academic Mental Health, Bristol Medical School said:
“P-risk detects who may be at risk of developing psychosis and we’ve been able to confirm that it performs well outside of the training dataset suggesting that it is transportable to other databases. It provides an individual risk of psychosis prediction and uses simple predictors that clinicians understand.
“Our tool is also automatable and can be incorporated into GP systems, in a similar way to existing risk algorithms used by GPs for physical health conditions.
“Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of electronic health records held by GPs to develop useful psychiatric prediction tools.”
Dr Sullivan is part of a group which has been awarded a grant by Transforming Health & Care Systems (THCS) Partnership, which supports coordinated national and regional research and innovation programmes to support health and care systems transformation.
The THCS Innovate to Prevent: Personalized Prevention in Health and Care Services grant will support investigating the use of P-Risk in the electronic health records of 5 other European countries.
