Atypical Antipsychotics Mediate Dynamics of Intrinsic Brain Activity in Early-Stage Schizophrenia? A Preliminary Study

Abstract

Objective Abnormalities of static brain activity have been reported in schizophrenia, but it remains to be clarified the temporal variability of intrinsic brain activities in schizophrenia and how atypical antipsychotics affect it.Methods We employed a resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and a sliding-window analysis of dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation (dALFF) to evaluate the dynamic brain activities in schizophrenia (SZ) patients before and after 8-week antipsychotic treatment. Twenty-six schizophrenia individuals and 26 matched healthy controls (HC) were included in this study.Results Compared with HC, SZ showed stronger dALFF in the right inferior temporal gyrus (ITG.R) at baseline. After medication, the SZ group exhibited reduced dALFF in the right middle occipital gyrus (MOG.R) and increased dALFF in the left superior frontal gyrus (SFG.L), right middle frontal gyrus (MFG.R), and right inferior parietal lobule (IPL.R). Dynamic ALFF in IPL.R was found to significant negative correlate with the Scale for the Assessment of Negative Symptoms (SANS) scores at baseline.Conclusion Our results showed dynamic intrinsic brain activities altered in schizophrenia after short term antipsychotic treatment. The findings of this study support and expand the application of dALFF method in the study of the pathological mechanism in psychosis in the future.

Disturbances in theta-beta band oscillations in precuneus and aberrant effective connectivity within default mode network as potential biomarkers of chronic schizophrenia: an EEG resting-state study

“…In line with the presented results, a previous study showed ALFF alteration in the frontal and temporal nodes of the CEN observed in ultra-high risk and drug-naïve rst-episode schizophrenia (Ma et al, 2023). Noteworthy, since antipsychotic medication effects in rst-episode patients were found to be manifested by increased ALFF in the bilateral frontal (SFG/MFG) and right IPL (Wang et al, 2021), it should be pointed out that the presented results on the activity of the right-shifted sources may be related with longterm antipsychotic effects in the examined sample. Moreover, considering speci c connectivity characteristics of the triple network in various psychiatric conditions, some studies on schizophrenia and depression indicate the strongest structural differences in PFC, including SFG, and that most discriminative functional abnormalities were found in the cingulate cortex and IPL (Han et al, 2019), which is in line with the present study.…”

Abnormal network homogeneity of default-mode network and its relationships with clinical symptoms in antipsychotic-naïve first-diagnosis schizophrenia

“…The difference in results may be associated with the heterogeneity of patients with schizophrenia. Nevertheless, research comprising functional or structural MRI using different analyses, such as global-brain FC ( Zhao et al, 2022 ), the dynamic amplitude of low-frequency fluctuation ( Wang et al, 2021 ), full- and short-range strength of FC ( Miao et al, 2020 ), and Trace ( Lee et al, 2016 ), have observed aberrant ITG in patients with schizophrenia, which is associated with psychotic ( Lee et al, 2016 ) and cognitive symptoms ( Lee et al, 2016 ) and might predict the response to an antipsychotic drug after 8 weeks ( Zhu et al, 2018 ). Previous studies also showed that both patients with schizophrenia and their unaffected siblings shared similar alterations in the ITG ( Liu H. et al, 2012 ; Zhu et al, 2018 ), and the neural activity of ITG was regulated by regulating by the Disrupted-in-Schizophrenia-1 gene ( Gou et al, 2018 ), suggesting that the ITG might be a potential biomarker of endophenotype for schizophrenia.…”

Identification of genetic features that are associated with amplitude of low‐frequency fluctuation changes in schizophrenia using omics analysis

“…This result is consistent with earlier findings that found increased expression of vesicular glutamate transporter 2 (VGLUT2) mRNA in the inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) of the schizophrenia (Uezato et al., 2009). Also, VGLUTs have a key role in the presynaptic release of glutamate into the synaptic gap, which may in part reflect the increased level of gene expression and its dALFF of the schizophrenia inferior temporal gyrus (ITG) is stronger (Wang, Jiang, et al., 2021). This region shows abnormalities in neural circuitry (Murphy et al., 2010).…”

“…Many studies have shown abnormal ALFF/dALFF changes in multiple brain regions in schizophrenia, such as ALFF in the lingual gyrus, wedge, and precuneus of schizophrenia decreased while ALFF in the left parahippocampal gyrus increased (Hoptman et al., 2010), and schizophrenia shows stronger dALFF in the right inferior temporal gyrus (ITG. R) (Wang, Jiang, et al., 2021), but their relationship with polygenic genetic variation is unclear. Therefore, ALFF and dALFF are used to explore the relationship between genes and specific brain regions in abnormal brain activities of schizophrenic patients, and combined with image features to reveal the impact of polygenic risk on brain activities of schizophrenic patients, to explore the correlation between image features and genetic features of schizophrenic patients.…”