Inhibition of the reward system by antipsychotic treatment

The mesolimbic dopaminergic reward system is responsible for the negative affective symptomatology of schizophrenia, which may be related to a low dopamine tonus within the ventral striatum. The monetary incentive delay (MID) task can be used to study the response of the ventral striatum to incentive stimuli. We show that activation of the ventral striatum is low in patients with schizophrenia, and that this low activation is related to primary and secondary negative symptoms induced by neuroleptics, also known as antipsychotics. Switching from first-(typical) to second-generation (atypical) antipsychotics increased activation of the ventral striatum due to less blocking of dopamine D2 receptors. This and similar studies show that functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) tasks are suitable to investigate important aspects of antipsychotic mechanisms.