Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Li, Tao
• Wang, Qiang
• Zhang, Jie
• Rolls, Edmund T
• Yang, Wei
• Palaniyappan, Lena
• Zhang, Lu
• Cheng, Wei
• Yao, Ye
• Liu, Zhaowen
• Gong, Xiaohong
• Luo, Qiang
• Tang, Yanqing
• Crow, Timothy J
• Broome, Matthew R
• Xu, Ke
• Li, Chunbo
• Wang, Jijun
• Liu, Zhening
• Lu, Guangming
• Wang, Fei
• Feng, Jianfeng

Titel

Brain-Wide Analysis of Functional Connectivity in First-Episode and Chronic Stages of Schizophrenia

Ist Teil von

• Schizophrenia bulletin, 2017-03, Vol.43 (2), p.436-448

Ort / Verlag

United States: Oxford University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2017

Quelle

Oxford Journals 2020 Medicine

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Published reports of functional abnormalities in schizophrenia remain divergent due to lack of staging point-of-view and whole-brain analysis. To identify key functional-connectivity differences of first-episode (FE) and chronic patients from controls using resting-state functional MRI, and determine changes that are specifically associated with disease onset, a clinical staging model is adopted. We analyze functional-connectivity differences in prodromal, FE (mostly drug naïve), and chronic patients from their matched controls from 6 independent datasets involving a total of 789 participants (343 patients). Brain-wide functional-connectivity analysis was performed in different datasets and the results from the datasets of the same stage were then integrated by meta-analysis, with Bonferroni correction for multiple comparisons. Prodromal patients differed from controls in their pattern of functional-connectivity involving the inferior frontal gyri (Broca's area). In FE patients, 90% of the functional-connectivity changes involved the frontal lobes, mostly the inferior frontal gyrus including Broca's area, and these changes were correlated with delusions/blunted affect. For chronic patients, functional-connectivity differences extended to wider areas of the brain, including reduced thalamo-frontal connectivity, and increased thalamo-temporal and thalamo-sensorimoter connectivity that were correlated with the positive, negative, and general symptoms, respectively. Thalamic changes became prominent at the chronic stage. These results provide evidence for distinct patterns of functional-dysconnectivity across FE and chronic stages of schizophrenia. Importantly, abnormalities in the frontal language networks appear early, at the time of disease onset. The identification of stage-specific pathological processes may help to understand the disease course of schizophrenia and identify neurobiological markers crucial for early diagnosis.