Tackling loneliness evidence review

n 2018, some of us (Barreto, Matthews, Qualter, Victor) contributed to an ESRC Think Piece on Loneliness and recommended that there needed to be increased investment from UKRI for research examining loneliness. We highlighted key gaps in the evidence and suggested those areas for priority funding. Since then, there has been increased investment for research on loneliness from UKRI and some of those evidence gaps have or are being filled. However, some have not been addressed and there remain important gaps to fill. In the 2018 ESRC Think Piece, the following recommendations were made: (1) the monitoring of loneliness and its drivers and consequences across the population and among specific subgroups, (2) the capturing of changes in prevalence or groups most affected by transient loneliness, with a view to understanding when and how it becomes chronic, (3) comparisons of local estimates of loneliness with national estimates, and (4) greater measurement consistency for population level surveys. In the first section of our review, we discuss the extent to which those recommendations have been endorsed, with new funding and knowledge made available

Intracranial and subcortical volumes in adolescents with early-onset psychosis: A multisite mega-analysis from the ENIGMA consortium.

Early-onset psychosis disorders are serious mental disorders arising before the age of 18 years. Here, we investigate the largest neuroimaging dataset, to date, of patients with early-onset psychosis and healthy controls for differences in intracranial and subcortical brain volumes. The sample included 263 patients with early-onset psychosis (mean age: 16.4 ± 1.4 years, mean illness duration: 1.5 ± 1.4 years, 39.2% female) and 359 healthy controls (mean age: 15.9 ± 1.7 years, 45.4% female) with magnetic resonance imaging data, pooled from 11 clinical cohorts. Patients were diagnosed with early-onset schizophrenia (n = 183), affective psychosis (n = 39), or other psychotic disorders (n = 41). We used linear mixed-effects models to investigate differences in intracranial and subcortical volumes across the patient sample, diagnostic subgroup and antipsychotic medication, relative to controls. We observed significantly lower intracranial (Cohen's d = -0.39) and hippocampal (d = -0.25) volumes, and higher caudate (d = 0.25) and pallidum (d = 0.24) volumes in patients relative to controls. Intracranial volume was lower in both early-onset schizophrenia (d = -0.34) and affective psychosis (d = -0.42), and early-onset schizophrenia showed lower hippocampal (d = -0.24) and higher pallidum (d = 0.29) volumes. Patients who were currently treated with antipsychotic medication (n = 193) had significantly lower intracranial volume (d = -0.42). The findings demonstrate a similar pattern of brain alterations in early-onset psychosis as previously reported in adult psychosis, but with notably low intracranial volume. The low intracranial volume suggests disrupted neurodevelopment in adolescent early-onset psychosis