Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University, New York, NY, USA.
Silver School of Social Work, New York University, New York, NY, USA.
J Child Psychol Psychiatry. 2024 Jun;65(6):776-784. doi: 10.1111/jcpp.13907. Epub 2023 Nov 13.
Understanding the etiology of psychosis is essential to the development of preventive interventions. The COVID-19 pandemic provides a rare natural experiment that can expand our understanding of the role of social factors in the trajectories and etiology of psychosis across adolescence, particularly in Tokyo where the prevalence of actual COVID-19 infection remained low. We hypothesized that the likelihood of self-reporting psychotic experiences (PEs) would increase following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Tokyo Teen Cohort (TTC) is a prospective cohort study of adolescents in the general population of the Tokyo metropolitan area, followed from age 10 to 16 years. We used multi-level linear regression models to test the associations between the phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and self-reported PEs.
Among 1935 adolescents included in the analysis, a rapid increase in PEs occurred at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, following approximately 6 years of steady decline across prior waves. This association was more pronounced for boys compared to girls. This increase became more pronounced as the pandemic moved into later phases, defined based on contemporaneous sociopolitical changes in Tokyo (i.e. changes to school closure, social distancing guidelines, and the state of emergency status).
The steady decline in PEs across adolescence was halted and reversed concurrent with the COVID-19 pandemic onset, despite very low rates of COVID-19 infection. This implicates COVID-19 related socioenvironmental factors as contributory etiological factors in the development of PEs in this adolescent cohort.
了解精神病的病因对于预防干预措施的发展至关重要。新冠疫情提供了一个难得的自然实验，可以扩展我们对社会因素在青少年精神病发生和病因中的作用的理解，特别是在东京，那里实际的新冠感染率仍然很低。我们假设，在新冠疫情爆发后，自我报告的精神病体验（PE）的可能性会增加。
东京青少年队列（TTC）是一项针对东京大都市区普通人群青少年的前瞻性队列研究，从 10 岁到 16 岁进行随访。我们使用多层次线性回归模型来测试新冠疫情各阶段与自我报告的 PE 之间的关联。
在纳入分析的 1935 名青少年中，在新冠疫情爆发时，PE 迅速增加，此前在之前的几波疫情中，PE 持续下降了大约 6 年。与女孩相比，男孩的这种关联更为明显。随着疫情进入后期阶段（根据东京同期的社会政治变化来定义，即学校关闭、社交距离指南和紧急状态的变化），这种关联变得更加明显。
尽管新冠感染率非常低，但在新冠疫情爆发时，青少年时期 PE 持续下降的趋势被阻止并逆转。这表明与新冠疫情相关的社会环境因素是该青少年队列中 PE 发展的促成病因因素。
