Sensory and motor secondary symptoms as indicators of brain vulnerability

Abstract

In addition to the primary symptoms that distinguish one disorder from the next, clinicians have identified, yet argely overlooked, another set of symptoms that appear across many disorders, termed secondary symptoms. In the emerging era of systems neuroscience, which highlights that many disorders share common deficits in global network features, the nonspecific nature of secondary symptoms should attract attention. Herein we provide a scholarly review of the literature on a subset of secondary symptoms - sensory and motor. We demonstrate that their pattern of appearance - across a wide range of psychopathologies, much before the full-blown disorder appears, and in healthy individuals who display a variety of negative symptoms - resembles the pattern of appearance of network abnormalities. We propose that sensory and motor secondary symptoms can be important indicators of underlying network aberrations and thus of vulnerable brain states putting individuals at risk for psychopathology following extreme circumstances.