[3] In 2015, the European Psychiatric Association issued guidance recommending the use of a subscale of basic symptoms, called the Cognitive Disturbances scale (COGDIS), in the assessment of psychosis risk in help-seeking psychiatric patients; in a meta-analysis, COGDIS was shown to be as predictive of transition to psychosis as the Ultra High Risk (UHR) criteria up to 2 years after assessment, and significantly more predictive thereafter.
[5] There are several factors that interact prior to the development of basic symptoms, including predisposed vulnerability, environmental stressors, and support systems.
[6] Recent work in the field of neural oscillation has demonstrated that defective excitatory and inhibitory signalling in the brain during development plays an important role in the formation of basic symptoms.
[6] It is important to identify when a person is exposed to these factors to prevent, modify or delay the onset of basic symptoms through early intervention.
[6] The recognition of these basic symptoms in the prodromal phase can lead to early intervention in psychosis that aids in the delay or prevention of schizophrenia.
At one point, uncharacteristic basic symptoms will appear, which comprise various disturbances of mood, emotions, drive, thought, and attention that can occur in many other disorders, followed by the characteristic basic symptoms, which comprise disturbances of thought, perception, and attention, along with minor reality distortion, that are associated with schizophrenia in particular.
The European Psychiatric Association (EPA) recommends the use of this scale, along with attenuated psychotic symptoms and brief transient psychosis, to detect at-risk mental states in help-seeking people.