Functional imaging as a predictor of schizophrenia.

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Psychiatry
• Schizophrenia Research

Background:

• Prospective studies in high-risk youth investigate pre-illness neural abnormalities.
• Identifying such abnormalities could aid in predicting schizophrenia development.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate baseline functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) differences in high-risk individuals who later developed schizophrenia.
• To compare these individuals with healthy controls and high-risk individuals who did not develop the disorder.

Main Methods:

• Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to scan young individuals with a high familial risk for schizophrenia.
• Participants included those who later developed schizophrenia (n=4), healthy controls (n=21), and high-risk individuals without psychosis (n=41) or with (n=21).
• A sentence completion task was administered during the fMRI scans.

Main Results:

• Individuals who developed schizophrenia showed increased parietal lobe activation and decreased anterior cingulate activation.
• Reduced activation increases with task difficulty were observed in the right lingual gyrus and bilateral temporal regions.
• Parietal activation combined with lingual gyrus activity predicted illness development with a positive predictive value of .80.

Conclusions:

• Functional brain abnormalities detected via fMRI distinguish high-risk individuals who develop schizophrenia from controls and unaffected high-risk individuals.
• These findings suggest that detectable neural differences are present before illness onset.
• fMRI may offer clinical utility in identifying individuals at high risk for schizophrenia.