The Athens Study on Proneness and Incidence of Schizophrenia (ASPIS) project began in 1999 as a research project of the University Mental Health Research Institute (UMHRI) in Athens, Greece and was funded by the Greek Ministry of Education.
The ASPIS examined 2,243 randomly selected young male conscripts aged 18 to 24 years who were recruited from the Greek Air Force during their first 2 weeks of admission in the National Basic Air Force Training Centre. This population sample was chosen because there is consistent evidence that individuals at this age are most likely to display the clinical and subclinical experiences of psychosis.
Conscripts underwent a battery of computerized cognitive and eye tracking tasks as well as a psychometric evaluation utilizing well-established self-rated instruments. Saliva samples for DNA extraction were also obtained for genetic analyses.
A Genome-Wide Association Study (GWAS) of the ASPIS was recently completed in collaboration with the Institute of Genetic Medicine at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, funded by the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Results are reported in the American Journal of Medical Genetics: Neuropsychiatric Genetics (Hatzimanolis et al., July 2015). Additional findings from the ASPIS GWAS study will be available soon…