The Danish 22q11 research initiative

Identification of predictive pre-morbid clinical, cognitive, functional and structural brain alterations in 22q11 deletion carriers may alter current clinical practice from symptomatic therapy of manifest mental illness into early intervention strategies, which may also be applicable to at risk subjects without known etiology. Hopefully new insights into the biological disease mechanisms, which are mandatory for novel drug developments, can improve the outcome of the pharmacological interventions in psychiatry.