NAPLS 3

NAPLS 3 is the third phase of the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study, a consortium of nine programs in the United States and Canada that follows help-seeking young people at clinical high risk for psychosis. It was funded by the National Institute of Mental Health from 2014 to 2019. The phase asks whether gray matter decline and resting-state connectivity change during the risk period itself, and how inflammation, stress hormones and synaptic plasticity relate to those changes and to the transition to psychosis. Data are held in NIMH Data Archive collection 2275.

Composition

Participants were recruited between February 2015 and November 2018 at Emory, Harvard, Calgary, UCLA, UCSD, UCSF, UNC Chapel Hill, Yale and Zucker Hillside Hospital. The methods paper reports 560 high-risk participants who met enriched entry criteria, 150 further high-risk participants followed with clinical interviews only, and 96 healthy controls. Mean ages are between 17 and 19 years; entry was open from 12 to 35. About 95% of the enriched group met attenuated positive symptom syndrome criteria, and close to half had depression. The NDA collection lists 814 shared subjects, 664 of them with records in the shared image data structure.

Acquisition

Enriched high-risk participants and controls had MRI, EEG, blood, urine and saliva sampling at baseline and up to four follow-ups two months apart, and again at transition to psychosis. Every site acquired 1 mm T1-weighted and T2-weighted images, single-shell diffusion with 41 directions at b = 1000 and single-band resting-state BOLD. Sites with Siemens Prisma scanners and 32-channel coils added multi-shell diffusion and multiband resting-state scans. A shared phantom and a traveling-subject sub-study, in which nine people were scanned at every site, were used for quality control. EEG used the same 64-channel BioSemi system at all sites.

Annotations

There are no image labels. Each participant has a consensus psychosis-risk diagnosis from structured interviews, SCID-5 diagnoses, symptom and functioning ratings, cognitive tests, life event and trauma measures, medication logs and follow-up status up to 24 months.

Known limitations

The scanner models of sites without a Prisma, field strengths and per-sequence scan counts are not published. The 150 clinical-only participants have no imaging. Counts in the paper describe the study sample and do not exactly match the shared NDA release. A NAPLS3 project also exists in the LONI Image and Data Archive, but its access terms are not public.