Background: Characterizing neurocognitive endophenotypes of mental illnesses (MIs) could be useful for identifying at-risk individuals, increasing early diagnosis, improving disease subtyping, and proposing therapeutic strategies to reduce the negative effects of the symptoms, in addition to serving as a scientific basis to unravel the physiopathology of the disease. However, a standardized algorithm to determine cognitive endophenotypes has not yet been developed. The main objective of this study was to present a method for the identification of endophenotypes in MI research.
Methods: For this purpose, a 14-expert working group used a scoping review methodology and designed a method that includes a scoring template with five criteria and indicators, a strategy for their verification, and a decision tree.
Conclusions: This work is ongoing since it is necessary to obtain external validation of the applicability of the method in future research.
Keywords: Mental illness; methodology design; neurocognitive endophenotype.