Industry-Satellite Symposia

Brief Description:

Long-Acting Injectable (LAI) antipsychotics are commonly used in the treatment of psychotic disorders (Schizophrenia or Bipolar Disorders) to improve clinical outcomes. Compared with oral administration, there is growing evidence of their effectiveness in preventing relapse and rehospitalization, and in decreasing the negative consequences of poor adherence during the early phases of the illness. However, multiple barriers to using LAI in patients have been identified due to the lack of knowledge about LAI.

Shared Decision-Making (SDM) is a health communication approach focusing on patient-clinician interactions around treatment decisions, with the goals of improving clinical and functional outcomes and providing personalized care.

Prof. Correll will present on the clinical benefits and impact of early use of Long-Acting Injectable Antipsychotics for patients with psychotic disorders. Shared Decision-Making (SDM) skills will be demonstrated in the role play session.

Chairman:

Prof. Philip Gorwood
GHU Paris Psychiatrie et Neurosciences
Université de Paris
Institut Psychiatrie et Neurosciences de Paris (INSERM U1266)
FRANCE

Speaker:

Prof. Christoph U. Correll
The Zucker Hillside Hospital
Department of Psychiatry
New York, USA

Brief Description: Exposure to stress early life represents a major environmental factor for the development of psychiatric disorders later in life and represents also the most impactful and established clinical risk factor for cognitive dysfunction across diseases. Moreover, several studies have highlighted the association between exposure to stress and alterations in sleep architecture as well as in the functionality of the immune system, suggesting that their alterations could represent an early biological substrate for the onset of several psychiatric disorders. Annamaria Cattaneo will first show how sleep disorders occur at a high rate in early onset psychosis, and in affective disorders, where sleep disturbances have been also found associated with symptom severity and symptoms progression. She will start discussing the association between alterations in sleep parameters with the severity of psychotic and cognitive symptoms, and with the exacerbation of psychotic symptoms. She will then move to show data in bipolar disorders, where similarly sleep disturbances are common especially in patients with cognitive deficits and have been also implicated in suicide risk. Moreover, although only few studies in the field of psychosis and mood disorders have investigated the relationship between sleep disturbances and immune system, she will show the mechanisms linking alterations in sleep parameters and sleep architecture with a systemic inflammatory status. As inflammation is a well-established biological risk factor for cognitive deficits and for psychiatric disorders onset and progression, she will highlight the importance of investigating the relationship between sleep parameters, inflammation, and cognition also in the context of psychosis and affective disorders. She will then conclude the lecture discussing the role of these biological systems both as an early signature for the onset of the disease as well as important targets for treatment efficacy.

Chairman:

Takahiro Kato, M.D., Ph.D
Kyushu University, Japan

Speaker:

Annamaria Cattaneo, Ph.D
IRCCS Fatebenefratelli Institute, Brescia, Italy
University of Milan, Milan, Italy

Brief Description: Individuals with schizophrenia exhibit impaired ability to process social information, also referred to as social cognition. Types of social cognitive impairments include difficulty in identifying emotions, inferring people’s thoughts, and reacting in an emotionally appropriate way to others. These impairments interfere with social connections and are strong determinants of impaired daily functioning for individuals with schizophrenia. In addition to social processing problems, people with schizophrenia also have deficits in social motivation – that is, they are less inclined to engage socially with their environment and do not look forward to social interactions as much as other people do. These motivational impairments have been assessed clinically as negative symptoms (e.g., anhedonia and asociality) and can be measured with experimental paradigms. Deficits in social motivation are closely associated with social disability in schizophrenia. This presentation will describe how methods and results from the field of social neuroscience can provide insights on the factors that underlie impairments in social ability and social motivation in schizophrenia. For social ability / social cognition, the presentation will cover impairments in illustrative social cognitive domains, including social cue perception (i.e., identifying emotions in faces and voices), mentalizing (i.e., making inferences about what others are thinking and feeling), and emotion regulation (i.e., managing one’s own emotional reactions to stimuli). For each social cognitive domain, there will be examples for patient-control differences in terms of performance on tasks, as well as neuroscientific evidence of patient-control differences using electroencephalography (EEG) or functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). For social motivation, a key difference that is relevant to schizophrenia is between impairments in social approach (i.e., having the desire for social interactions) versus social avoidance (i.e., feeling distress or anxious about social interactions). These types of social motivation rely on distinct neural systems. Although social motivation is mainly assessed with clinical interviews (such as those for negative symptoms) and self-report scales, we will describe some recently-developed behavioral and EEG paradigms that can directly compare participants reactions to social versus nonsocial stimuli. Studies using these types of experimental tasks can reveal subtle deficits in social preference in people with schizophrenia. Other topics to be discussed include preliminary efforts to link the neuroscientific data from EEG or fMRI to real-world social interactions. If such associations can be reliably established, it would provide meaningful brain-based biomarkers of social impairment in schizophrenia that could inform intervention studies. Lastly, both social processing ability and social motivation are amenable to interventions for people with schizophrenia. These treatments can include training interventions (to improve aspects of social cognition) or innovative psychosocial interventions (to enhance social motivation).

Chairman:

Yen-Kuang Yang, M.D.
National Cheng Kung University, Taiwan

Speaker:

Michael F. Green, Ph.D
University of California Los Angeles, USA