Progressive gray matter reduction in schizophrenia patients with persistent auditory hallucinations by causal...

Area of Science:

• Neuroimaging
• Psychiatry
• Systems Neuroscience

Background:

• Schizophrenia patients with auditory hallucinations exhibit distinct morphological abnormalities.
• The progressive gray matter atrophy pattern and causal effect transmission in this population remain unclear.
• This study aimed to construct a causal structural covariance network in schizophrenia patients with persistent auditory hallucinations.

Purpose of the Study:

• To construct a causal structural covariance network (CaSCN) in schizophrenia patients with persistent auditory hallucinations (pAH).
• To map the causal effects and transmission patterns of gray matter volume (GMV) changes.
• To investigate the relationship between GMV atrophy and auditory hallucination severity.

Main Methods:

• Acquired T1-weighted MRI images from 90 schizophrenia patients with pAH and 83 healthy controls (HC).
• Utilized stage-specific independent t-tests to compare GMV between groups and identify atrophic patterns and origins.
• Constructed the CaSCN in the pAH group, mapping causal effects from the atrophic origin as hallucination severity increased.

Main Results:

• GMV reductions initiated in the thalamus, medial frontal gyri, Rolandic operculum, and calcarine, expanding to other brain regions with increasing hallucination severity.
• The thalamus was identified as the causal origin in the CaSCN.
• Transitional nodes (e.g., inferior frontal gyrus, postcentral gyri) projected causal information to target nodes across cortical and subcortical areas, including the cerebellum.

Conclusions:

• Causal effects in schizophrenia with persistent auditory hallucinations originate from the thalamus.
• A specific transmission pattern of causal information within a thalamic-cortical-cerebellar circuitry was revealed.
• Findings indicate thalamic-cortical-cerebellar circuitry dysfunction associated with auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia.