Researchers at UCLA Health have found that a person's risk of developing psychotic-like experiences may be influenced by both childhood attention problems and their genetic makeup, reports UCLA Health.

The respective findings, published in Nature Mental Health, build upon a long-studied association between childhood attention problems and the likelihood of later developing schizophrenia.

Using data from about 10,000 children over six years, UCLA researchers sought to determine how attentional variability influenced the risk of broader psychotic-like symptoms as children grow into adolescence.

Specifically, the team looked at how the youths’ risk for psychotic-like experiences varied based on their attention span and genetic variants that may predispose them to different neuropsychiatric conditions

The researchers found that a higher genetic risk for a broad set of neuropsychiatric and cognitive disorders was associated with greater severity of psychotic like experiences and greater attention issues.

Additionally, attention span variability partially acted as an intermediate between the relationships between genetic risk for neuropsychiatric disorders and the expression of psychotic-like symptoms. Attention span issues explained 4-16% of these associations.

The researchers noted that next to the already known factors of psychosis, there are still unexplored mechanisms.