Cerebral blood flow in striatal regions is associated with apathy in patients with schizophrenia

Abstract

Background: Striatal dysfunction has been proposed as a pathomechanism for negative symptoms in schizophrenia. There is consensus that negative symptoms can be grouped into 2 dimensions: apathy and diminished expression. Recent studies suggest that different neural mechanisms underlie these dimensions, but the relationship between regional resting-state cerebral blood flow (rCBF) and negative symptom dimensions has not been investigated. Methods: This study included 29 patients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls. We measured rCBF in the striatum using arterial spin labelling (ASL) MRI. We assessed negative symptoms using the Brief Negative Symptom Scale. Results: In the ventral and dorsal striatum, rCBF was not different between patients with schizophrenia and controls. However, we did find a positive association between the severity of apathy and increased rCBF in the ventral and dorsal striatum in patients with schizophrenia. This effect was not present for diminished expression. Limitations: All patients were taking atypical antipsychotics, so an effect of antipsychotic medication on rCBF could not be excluded, although we did not find a significant association between rCBF and chlorpromazine equivalents. Conclusion: The main finding of this study was a specific association between increased striatal rCBF and the negative symptom dimension of apathy. Our results further support the separate assessment of apathy and diminished expression when investigating the neural basis of negative symptoms. The ASL technique can provide a direct and quantitative approach to investigating the role of rCBF changes in the pathophysiology of negative symptoms.

Different patterns of cerebral perfusion in SLE patients with and without neuropsychiatric manifestations

“…Arterial spin labeling (ASL) imaging, which is a contrast agent‐free perfusion imaging technique, has been validated as being useful for the evaluation of brain perfusion related to various neurological and psychiatric diseases, including Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, brain tumor, stroke, seizures, and schizophrenia (Haller et al, ; Le et al, ; Oura et al, ; Schneider et al, ). In particular, the development of three‐dimensional (3D) ASL‐MRI with GRASE (a technique combining gradient rapid echo and spin echo) or FSE (fast spin echo) acquisition dramatically improves the perfusion image quality with a high signal‐to‐noise ratio and spatial‐resolution (Alsop et al, ; Uetani et al, ).…”

Regional cortical perfusion increases induced by a 6-month endurance training in young sedentary adults

“…The ventral striatum, and especially dopaminergic signaling within the nucleus accumbens, has traditionally been associated with reward-related functioning, for example, motivational energization of behavior and reinforcement learning processes (Haber and Knutson, 2010;Salamone and Correa, 2012). In line with this reasoning, clinical studies observed that reductions in ventral striatal blood flow were correlated with apathy in psychiatric patients (Schneider et al, 2019). In this context, it is interesting that a recent observational study in N = 111 young adult women (Gorrell et al, 2022) found positive correlations between self-reported exercise engagement energization and brain responses during BOLD fMRI reward paradigms in the medial orbitofrontal cortex and, slightly weaker, in the ventral striatum.…”

Decreased Relative Cerebral Blood Flow in Unmedicated Heroin-Dependent Individuals

“…ASL images were preprocessed by ASLtbx ( 15 ) using the following steps: motion correction (MoCo) ( 20 , 21 ), temporal denoising, spatial smoothing, CBF quantification, outlier cleaning, partial volume correction (PVC), spatial registration to the Montreal Neurology Institute (MNI) standard brain space, and CBF extraction for regions of interest (ROIs). Temporal filtering used a high-pass Butterworth filter (cutoff frequency = 0.01 Hz) and temporal nuisance cleaning.…”

“…CBF measured with ASL MRI has been shown to closely resemble that measured by PET or dynamic susceptibility contrast (DSC) and has high test-retest stability (17,18). Over time, ASL MRI has been increasingly used in neuropsychiatric studies (19,20) including drug addiction (9). However, the technique has rarely been used to study heroin addiction.…”