TY - JOUR AU - Schreuder, Marieke J. AU - Hartman, Catharina A. AU - George, Sandip V. AU - Menne-Lothmann, Claudia AU - Decoster, Jeroen AU - van Winkel, Ruud AU - Delespaul, Philippe AU - De Hert, Marc AU - Derom, Catherine AU - Thiery, Evert AU - Rutten, Bart P. F. AU - Jacobs, Nele AU - van Os, Jim AU - Wigman, Johanna T. W. AU - Wichers, Marieke PY - 2020 DA - 2020/10/14 TI - Early warning signals in psychopathology: what do they tell? JO - BMC Medicine SP - 269 VL - 18 IS - 1 AB - Despite the increasing understanding of factors that might underlie psychiatric disorders, prospectively detecting shifts from a healthy towards a symptomatic state has remained unattainable. A complex systems perspective on psychopathology implies that such symptom shifts may be foreseen by generic indicators of instability, or early warning signals (EWS). EWS include, for instance, increasing variability, covariance, and autocorrelation in momentary affective states—of which the latter was studied. The present study investigated if EWS predict (i) future worsening of symptoms as well as (ii) the type of symptoms that will develop, meaning that the association between EWS and future symptom shifts would be most pronounced for congruent affective states and psychopathological domains (e.g., feeling down and depression). SN - 1741-7015 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12916-020-01742-3 DO - 10.1186/s12916-020-01742-3 ID - Schreuder2020 ER -