JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Psychotic disorders are a major public health issue, and their disability is partially dependent on the duration of untreated condition. Ultra-high risk (UHR) of psychosis is a potential prodromal stage that occurs before the full development of a first episode of psychosis.

Objective:

One way to differentiate above-threshold psychosis from UHR is to systematically study the scientific “Areas Of Interest” (AOIs) of these conditions.

Methods:

In June 2022, we performed a computational text analysis of associated terms for above-threshold psychosis and UHR using the biomedical database PubMed. We conducted an undirected lexical network analysis to map the 150 first terms in space and used an unsupervised machine learning technique to detect word patterns and automatically cluster AOIs with a topic-modeling analysis.

Results:

Between 1853 and 2022, we identified 11,840 articles for UHR (8.1x108 terms) and 417,557 articles for above-threshold psychosis (1.9x109 terms). Four AOIs were detected in the UHR network: clinical and neuropsychological descriptions, comorbidities, community and health care, treatment. Four AOIs were detected in the above-threshold psychosis network: risk factors and dynamic of the disorder, community and health care, neuropsychology, and comorbidities.

Conclusions:

The partial overlap between UHR and above-threshold psychosis suggests that they are closely related but should be distinguished in their methods of investigation and the organization of health care. Considering these non-clinical elements could allow research to structure differential quality care for users of health systems while redirecting priority research areas towards the main areas of interest of these conditions in a logic of precision medicine.