THE MISMATCH NEGATIVITY (MMN)- A UNIQUE BIOMARKER PREDICTING PSYCHOSIS ONSET IN CLINICALLY AT-RISK INDIVIDUALS

Recently, the clinical research using the MMN , an automatic brain response to any discriminable change in some repetitive aspect of ongoing auditory stimulation, has been rapidly increasing. Some  of the most important findings  highlight the utility of the MMN in predicting psychosis onset in clinically at-risk patients, usually adolescents or young adults. A small MMN in particular to occasional duration increment of the repetitive stimulus ("standard")  in these individuals predicts psychosis onset within a relatively short time, usually 1-2 years. Moreover, this predictive ability is further strengthened when deviant stimuli differ from standards both in duration and frequency  in parallel. In particular when this MMN deficit is recorded in individuals with occasional psychiatric symptoms, this should be taken as a serious  warning signal , and treatment should be immediately started. Consequently, this talk will introduce the MMN as a biomarker  for detecting individuals with a considerably  increased risk of psychosis onset before irreversible pathological processes  in the brain occur.