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Altered hemispheric functional dominance during word generation in negative schizophrenia
Schizophrenia Bulletin
|September 19, 2000
Summary
Schizophrenia patients show altered brain activity during word production, with reduced left-hemisphere activation and atypical right-hemisphere engagement. These functional changes in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) may indicate a compensatory pattern in negative schizophrenia.
Area of Science:
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Neuroscience
- Psychiatry
Background:
- Functional brain imaging studies indicate reduced frontal lobe activation in schizophrenia.
- Hemispheric dominance for language processing in schizophrenia remains under-investigated.
- Negative schizophrenia symptoms are associated with cognitive deficits, including verbal fluency.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate regional brain activation and language lateralization during word production tasks in patients with negative schizophrenia.
- To compare brain activity patterns between negative schizophrenia patients and healthy volunteers.
- To explore the relationship between brain activity lateralization and verbal fluency performance.
Main Methods:
- Positron Emission Tomography (PET) with H2(15)O was used to measure normalized regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF).
- 14 patients with negative schizophrenia and 14 healthy volunteers were scanned during rest, vocalized verbal fluency, and spontaneous word production.
- Anatomical volumes of interest (VOI) method was employed for image analysis, comparing changes from rest between groups.
Main Results:
- Significant differences in the lateralization of rCBF changes were observed in frontal and inferior parietal regions between schizophrenia patients and controls.
- Schizophrenia patients exhibited reduced left frontal activation and abnormal right inferior frontal activation during word production.
- Weaker right inferior parietal deactivation was noted in patients, with right hemisphere changes correlating negatively with verbal fluency performance.
Conclusions:
- Negative schizophrenia patients display atypical hemispheric lateralization for language tasks, characterized by reduced left-sided and aberrant right-sided frontal activation.
- Altered right hemisphere activity in schizophrenia patients may represent a compensatory mechanism for impaired left-hemisphere language processing.
- These findings highlight distinct patterns of functional brain organization in schizophrenia, impacting language production and cognitive performance.