Panos Bitsios

University of Crete | UOC · Division of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences

Objective To examine cold (based on logical reasoning) versus hot (having emotional components) executive function processes in groups with high individual schizotypal traits. Method Two-hundred and forty-seven participants were administered the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire and were allocated into schizotypal (cognitive-perceptual, parano...

The present study aims to explore the association of maternal sleep disturbances during late pregnancy on child neuropsychological and behavioral development in preschool years. The study included 638 mother–child pairs from the prospective Rhea mother–child cohort in Crete, Greece. Information on antenatal sleep disturbances was collected through...

The near and far transfer effects of Working Memory (WM) training have yielded discrepant findings while there is no literature on the effects of Executive Working Memory (EWM) training. The present study aimed to investigate the far transfer effects of EWM on cognitive flexibility. Community participants (n = 144) were allocated into a fully-, a p...

Broad-based cognitive deficits are an enduring and disabling symptom for many patients with severe mental illness, and these impairments are inadequately addressed by current medications. While novel drug targets for schizophrenia and depression have emerged from recent large-scale genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of these psychiatric disorde...

Introduction: According to the fully-dimensional approach, schizotypy is a personality trait present in the population in a continuous manner while the quasi-dimensional approach emphasises its extreme presentations. In this study we examined the relationship between sensorimotor gating, a core risk-index of the schizophrenia-spectrum, and four sch...

Background Cognitive traits demonstrate significant genetic correlations with many psychiatric disorders and other health-related traits. Many neuropsychiatric and neurodegenerative disorders are marked by cognitive deficits. Therefore, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of general cognitive ability might suggest potential targets for nootropic...

The efficacy of working memory training (WMT) has been a controversial and debated issue during the past years. Despite a large number of training studies and several meta-analyses, the matter has not yet been solved. So the aim of this research is the investigation of the effect of the working memory training (WMT) on cognitive flexibility in both...

Susceptibility to schizophrenia is inversely correlated with general cognitive ability at both the phenotypic and the genetic level. Paradoxically, a modest but consistent positive genetic correlation has been reported between schizophrenia and educational attainment, despite the strong positive genetic correlation between cognitive ability and edu...

There is growing evidence associating inflammatory markers in complex, higher order neurological functions, such as cognition and memory. We examined whether high levels of various inflammatory markers are associated with cognitive outcomes at 4 years of age in a mother-child cohort in Crete, Greece (Rhea study). We included 642 children in this cr...

Liability to schizophrenia is inversely correlated with general cognitive ability at both the phenotypic and genetic level. Paradoxically, a modest but consistent positive genetic correlation has been reported between schizophrenia and educational attainment, despite the strong positive genetic correlation between cognitive ability and educational...

Hill (Twin Research and Human Genetics, Vol. 21, 2018, 84–88) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled ‘Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets’ (Lam et al., Cell Reports , Vol. 21, 2017, 2597–2613). Specifically, Hill offered severa...

The efficacy of working memory training (WMT) has been a controversial and debated issue during the past years. Despite a large number of training studies and several meta-analyses, the matter has not yet been solved. However, at the same time similar efforts concerning executive functions are less popular. These efforts suggest that systematic tra...

Intelligence is highly heritable 1 and a major determinant of human health and well-being 2 . Recent genome-wide meta-analyses have identified 24 genomic loci linked to variation in intelligence3-7, but much about its genetic underpinnings remains to be discovered. Here, we present a large-scale genetic association study of intelligence (n = 269,86...

General cognitive function is a prominent and relatively stable human trait that is associated with many important life outcomes. We combine cognitive and genetic data from the CHARGE and COGENT consortia, and UK Biobank (total N = 300,486; age 16-102) and find 148 genome-wide significant independent loci (P < 5 × 10-8) associated with general cogn...

Hill (2017) presented a critique of our recently published paper in Cell Reports entitled “Large-Scale Cognitive GWAS Meta-Analysis Reveals Tissue-Specific Neural Expression and Potential Nootropic Drug Targets” (Lam et al. 2017). Specifically, Hill offered several inter-related comments suggesting potential problems with our use of a new analytic...

Sensorimotor gating measured by prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the acoustic startle response (ASR) has been proposed as one of the most promising electrophysiological endophenotypes of schizophrenia. During the past decade, a number of publications have reported significant associations between genetic polymorphisms and PPI in samples of schizophreni...

This report describes the Student Counselling Centre (SCC) at the University of Crete. The SCS was established in 2003. Its main areas of activity are individual and group psychological support, crisis intervention, research, prevention, volunteering and awareness. Emphasis is also put on the support provided to students with special needs, which i...

Here, we present a large (n = 107,207) genome-wide association study (GWAS) of general cognitive ability (“g”), further enhanced by combining results with a large-scale GWAS of educational attainment. We identified 70 independent genomic loci associated with general cognitive ability. Results showed significant enrichment for genes causing Mendelia...

In the present study we examined the effects of working memory training on cognitive flexibility in humans. Forty healthy male participants were divided into three groups (matched for demographic variables, schizotypy, impulsivity and baseline cognitive flexibility): a) fully adapted group (participants were fully trained with an executive working...

Cognitive flexibility is the ability to adapt cognitive processing strategies to face new and unexpected changes and is intrinsically linked to attentional processes [Canas et al., 2007; Moore & Malinowski, 2009]. Cognitive flexibility is significantly affected in several neuropsychiatric diseases, such as schizophrenia, depression and obsessive-co...

Molecular Psychiatry publishes work aimed at elucidating biological mechanisms underlying psychiatric disorders and their treatment

General cognitive function is a prominent human trait associated with many important life outcomes 1,2 , including longevity ³ . The substantial heritability of general cognitive function is known to be polygenic, but it has had little explication in terms of the contributing genetic variants 4,5,6 . Here, we combined cognitive and genetic data fro...

Neurocognitive ability is a fundamental readout of brain function, and cognitive deficits are a critical component of neuropsychiatric disorders, yet neurocognition is poorly understood at the molecular level. In the present report, we present the largest genome-wide association studies (GWAS) of cognitive ability to date (N=107,207), and further e...

Background: Poor perinatal maternal mental health has been linked with negative outcomes on early child development; however, the importance of maternal personality has been neglected thus far. We aimed to examine the effects of antenatal and postnatal maternal mental health, including assessment of maternal personality characteristics, on child n...

Profile in a nutshell • The Rhea cohort is a pregnancy cohort investigating how early life nutritional, environmental and social stressors may affect child health and development. • Pregnant women (n¼1610) residing in the prefecture of Heraklion in Crete, Greece, were recruited at the time of the first major ultrasound (median 12 weeks of gestation...

Schizotypal personality traits may increase proneness to psychosis and likely index familial vulnerability to schizophrenia (SZ), implying shared genetic determinants with SZ. Here, we sought to investigate the contribution of common genetic risk variation for SZ on self-reported schizotypy in 2 ethnically homogeneous cohorts of healthy young males...

The complex nature of human cognition has resulted in cognitive genomics lagging behind many other fields in terms of gene discovery using genome-wide association study (GWAS) methods. In an attempt to overcome these barriers, the current study utilized GWAS meta-analysis to examine the association of common genetic variation (~8M single-nucleotide...

Aims Few epidemiological studies evaluated associations between perinatal complications and maternal mood at the early postpartum period and the findings are inconsistent. We aimed at investigating a wide range of complications during pregnancy, at delivery, and at the early postpartum period as determinants of postpartum depression (PPD) at 8 week...

Study design: Cross-sectional survey with longitudinal follow-up OBJECTIVES.: To test the hypothesis that pain which is localised to the low back differs epidemiologically from that which occurs simultaneously or close in time to pain at other anatomical sites SUMMARY OF BACKGROUND DATA.: Low back pain (LBP) often occurs in combination with other...

Introduction: Although cognitive deficits are consistent endophenotypes of schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, findings in psychotic bipolar disorder (BDP) are inconsistent. In this study we compared adult unaffected first-degree relatives of schizophrenia and BDP patients on cognition, psychopathology, social functioning and quality of life. Met...

Background: Persistent Organic Pollutants (POPs) are highly-resistant compounds to environmental degradation and due to fat solubility they bioaccumulate through the food chain. As they cross the placenta, in utero exposure to POPs could disrupt child neurodevelopment as they are considered to be neurotoxic. Aims: We examined whether in utero ex...

Background: Increased schizotypal traits are observed in a percentage of the general population and in the schizophrenia-spectrum and have been associated with impairments in working memory. In this study we examined the effects of four schizotypal dimensions [Negative (NegS), Paranoid (ParS), Cognitive-Perceptual (CPS), Disorganized (DiS)] on exe...

Research has highlighted the wide impact of maternal mental health problems during and beyond the postpartum period and the public health role of community health professionals in early detection of women who may be at risk. This paper aims to describe, explore and test an a priori hypothesised conceptual model of postnatal experience, identifying...

Introduction: Studies assessing the effects of schizotypal dimensions (i.e., positive, negative, and disorganized) on cognitive functions have yielded mixed findings. In the present study, we administered an extensive battery of cognitive tasks to a community sample and defined the schizotypal dimensions according to a more analytical four-factor...

Somatising tendency, defined as a predisposition to worry about common somatic symptoms, is importantly associated with various aspects of health and health-related behaviour, including musculoskeletal pain and associated disability. To explore its epidemiological characteristics, and how it can be specified most efficiently, we analysed data from...

Supporting Dataset. (DTA)

Metadata. (XLSX)

Committees which provided ethical approval for the CUPID study. (DOCX)

To inform case-definition for neck/shoulder pain in epidemiological research, we compared levels of disability, patterns of association and prognosis for pain that was limited to the neck or shoulders (LNSP) and more generalised musculoskeletal pain that involved the neck or shoulder(s) (GPNS). Baseline data on musculoskeletal pain, disability and...

ΔΙΑΔΙΚΤΥΑΚΗ ΕΦΑΡΜΟΓΗ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΣΥΛΛΟΓΗ ΦΑΙΝΟΤΥΠΩΝ ΓΙΑ ΠΡΩΙΜΗ ΔΙΑΓΝΩΣΗ ΨΥΧΙΚΩΝ ΔΙΑΤΑΡΑΧΩΝ

ΔΙΑΔΙΚΤΥΑΚΗ ΕΦΑΡΜΟΓΗ ΓΙΑ ΤΗΝ ΣΥΛΛΟΓΗ ΦΑΙΝΟΤΥΠΩΝ ΓΙΑ ΠΡΩΙΜΗ ΔΙΑΓΝΩΣΗ ΨΥΧΙΚΩΝ ΔΙΑΤΑΡΑΧΩΝ

Inbreeding depression refers to lower fitness among offspring of genetic relatives. This reduced fitness is caused by the inheritance of two identical chromosomal segments (autozygosity) across the genome, which may expose the effects of (partially) recessive deleterious mutations. Even among outbred populations, autozygosity can occur to varying d...

Objective Schizotypy may be a forerunner of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD). In this study we examined for the first time the association between schizotypy and prefrontal function, quality of life (QoL) and general psychopathology (GenPsych) in 27 healthy subjects with no family history of SSD and 50 unaffected first-degree relatives of SSD...

Cognitive deficits and reduced educational achievement are common in psychiatric illness; understanding the genetic basis of cognitive and educational deficits may be informative about the etiology of psychiatric disorders. A recent, large genome-wide association study (GWAS) reported a genome-wide significant locus for years of education, which su...

Supporting Information Table S2: ASPIS GWAS hits with p<.0001 for each phenotypic outcome analyzed.

Supporting Information Table S3: Comparison of task performance between the ASPIS discovery and follow‐up sub‐samples.

Supporting Information Table S4:Correlation analyses between PGC‐SZ polygenic risk scores and ASPIS phenotypes.

Supporting Information Figure S1: Quantile‐quantile (QQ) plots of the GWAS results for the 12 phenotypic outcomes examined in the ASPIS discovery sample.

Supporting Information Table S1: Top GWAS SNPs selected for replication in the ASPIS follow‐up and the LOGOS samples.

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) of the startle reflex has been suggested as a candidate endophenotype for schizophrenia research, as it shows high heritability and has been found deficient in schizophrenia spectrum disorders. The objectives of the study were to 1) identify common genetic variants associated with baseline startle and PPI; 2) estimate the...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/npjschz.2014.2.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1038/npjschz.2014.2.].

Neurocognitive abilities constitute complex traits with considerable heritability. Impaired neurocognition is typically observed in schizophrenia (SZ), whereas convergent evidence has shown shared genetic determinants between neurocognition and SZ. Here, we report a genome-wide association study (GWAS) on neuropsychological and oculomotor traits, l...

The CACNA1C rs1006737 risk A allele has been associated with affective psychoses and functional studies indicate that it is associated with increased hippocampal/amygdala activity during emotional face-processing. Here we studied the impact of the risk A allele on affective startle modulation. Hundred and ninety-four healthy males stratified for th...

Background: Cognitive impairment cuts across traditional diagnostic boundaries and is one of the most typical symptoms in various psychiatric and neurobiological disorders. Aims: The objective of this study was to examine the genetic association between 94 candidate genes, including receptors and enzymes that participate in neurotransmission, wi...

Introduction Although Positive (PS) and Negative Schizotypy (NS) are considered distinct entities, prefrontal dysfunction seems to be a common underlying mechanism. According to recent evidence, PS can be divided into Paranoid (ParS) and Cognitive-Perceptual (CPS). Objectives To explore NS', ParS' and CPS' profiles of prefrontal function/psychopath...

Aim: The purpose of the present study was to investigate the burden of the family caregivers of patients with major mental disorders and the factors that affect caregiver burden in Crete, Greece. Methods: A total of 140 primary family caregivers were investigated using the Greek version of the Involvement Evaluation Questionnaire-European Version (...

Three-dimensional chromosomal conformations regulate transcription by moving enhancers and reg-ulatory elements into spatial proximity with target genes. Here we describe activity-regulated long-range loopings bypassing up to 0.5 Mb of linear genome to modulate NMDA glutamate receptor GRIN2B expression in human and mouse prefrontal cortex. Distal i...

Background The single-nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) rs10503253, located within the CUB and Sushi multiple domains-1 (CSMD1) gene on 8p23.2, has reached genome-wide support as a risk factor for schizophrenia. There is initial but inconclusive evidence for a role of this variant in aspects of cognition. Methods We investigated the neurocognitive eff...

It has long been recognized that generalized deficits in cognitive ability represent a core component of schizophrenia (SCZ), evident before full illness onset and independent of medication. The possibility of genetic overlap between risk for SCZ and cognitive phenotypes has been suggested by the presence of cognitive deficits in first-degree relat...

Breast feeding duration has been associated with improved cognitive development in children. However, few population-based prospective studies have evaluated dose-response relationships of breastfeeding duration with language and motor development at early ages, and results are discrepant. The study uses data from the prospective mother-child cohor...

Objective: To explore whether postpartum maternal depressive symptoms are associated with weight gain in the first 18 months of life. Materials/methods: 831 women with singleton pregnancies and their children with information on maternal depressive symptoms and infant weight for at least one follow-up period up to 18 months postpartum were included...

Subjects with low/undetectable startle are usually excluded from startle studies but few reports not confounded by this factor, show reduced startle in healthy impulsive subjects, or clinical populations with disorders of affect and impulsivity but also in schizophrenia and its prodrome. We examined the relationship of startle reactivity including...

Antenatal maternal mental health has been identified as an important determinant of postpartum depression (PPD). We investigated the occurrence of depression both antenatally and postnatally and examined whether maternal trait anxiety and depression during pregnancy were associated with PPD at 8 weeks postpartum in a prospective mother-child cohort...