A psychosis risk prediction tool developed by primary care researchers could help GPs identify patients earlier.
Known as P-risk, the tool takes into account a range of factors including age, sex, ethnicity, social deprivation, smoking history and previous consultations for suicidal behaviour.
The tool developed at the University of Bristol also considers depression/anxiety and medications being taken for it, substance misuse, post-traumatic stress disorder/obsessive compulsive disorder and number of consultations overall.
Most people with psychosis in the UK enter specialist psychosis care via a referral from their GP, the researchers said.
But GPs can find it difficult to detect the condition’s early features and they currently don’t have access to risk prediction tools to help them screen patients.
Having a way to accurately identify risk could help GPs expedite patients for specialist support, they added, or provide more regular review.
Using GP records from more than 1.65 million patients, the researchers found that that P-risk was able to accurately predict the risk of psychosis without the need to collect additional or new data.
Reporting in the British Journal of General Practice, they found the risk tool could was 78% accurate in identifying those who would later be diagnosed with psychosis.
They concluded that the usefulness of P-Risk would be as a screening instrument that ‘prompts GPs to consider the possibility of psychosis’ because it is a condition they might not see that commonly.
It might also prompt GPs to hold regular reviews or ‘safety netting’ if someone was identified as being at risk.
‘The only disadvantage of a false positive is that the GP might ask the patient further questions about psychosis and mental health, which is a small price to pay for a timely referral to specialist services, if that is what the GP decides to do,’ they added.
Dr Sarah Sullivan, lead author and senior research fellow at 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 dataset we trained it on.
‘It provides an individual risk prediction and uses simple predictors that clinicians understand.’
She added: ‘Our tool is also automatable and can be incorporated into GP systems, such as existing risk algorithms used by GPs for physical health predictors.’
‘Overall, this study demonstrates the potential of electronic health records held by GPs to develop useful psychiatric tools.’
Only if there is a GP available to review patients who do NOT think they are unwell on a regular basis to screen for it………
My brain leaps to the question of “what is the statin of psychiatry?” Is this knights move thinking?