Deficits of perceived spatial separation induced prepulse inhibition in patients with schizophrenia: relationships to symptoms and neurocognition

Abstract

BackgroundPrepulse inhibition (PPI) and attention were impaired, which may cause psychotic symptoms and (or) hinder the cognitive functions in schizophrenia. However, due to the measurement methods of PPI, findings about the relationship between PPI and clinical symptoms, cognitive performances have been equivocal.MethodsSeventy-five schizophrenia patients (SZ) and 50 healthy controls (HC) were assessed in a modified acoustic PPI paradigm, named perceived spatial separation-induced PPI (PSS-PPI), compared to perceived spatial co-location PPI (PSC-PPI) with inter-stimulus interval (ISI) of 120 ms. Repeatable Battery for the Assessment of Neuropsychological Status and the Stroop Color-Word Test were administered to all subjects.ResultsSignificant decrease in the modified PPI was found in the patients as compared to the controls, and effect sizes (Cohen’d) for patients vs. HCs % PPI levels achieved a significant level (PSC-PPI d = 0.84, PSS-PPI d = 1.27). A logistic regression model based on PSS-PPI significantly represented the diagnostic grouping (χ2 = 29.3; p < 0 .001), with 85.2% area under ROC curve in predicting group membership.In addition, patients exhibited deficits in neurocognition. Among patients of “non-remission”, after controlling for gender, age, education, duration, recurrence times, onset age, cigarettes per day and chlorpromazine equivalent dosage, PSS-PPI levels were associated with positive and negative symptoms, PANSS total and thought disorder (P1, P6, P7, N5, N7, G9). In multiple linear regression analyses, male and higher attention scores contributed to better PSC-PPI and PSS-PPI in controls group, while larger amount of smoke and longer word-color interfere time contributed to poor PSS-PPI. In patients’ group, higher education and attention scores contributed to better PSS-PPI, while repeated relapse contributed to poor PSS-PPI.ConclusionsThe acoustic perceived spatial separation-induced PPIs may bring to light the psychopathological symptoms, especially for thought disorder, and the mechanism(s) of the novel PPI paradigm was associated with attention function.

Neural correlates of perceptual separation-induced enhancement of prepulse inhibition of startle in humans

“…Electrode resistances were <5 kΩ. The eyeblink component of the acoustic startle system was measured using a human EMG startle reflex system (EMG XEYE human startle reflex, Tianminghongyuan Instruments, Beijing, China) 38 . EMG activity was band-pass filtered (10–500 Hz) and amplified by 40,000.…”

Lower prepulse inhibition in clinical high‐risk groups but not in familial risk groups for psychosis compared with healthy controls

“…However, studies that focus on the relationship between PPI and cognition in both patients with schizophrenia and healthy people have inconsistent results. PPI deficits were reported to be correlated with attention scores, working memory, verbal learning, and memory performances in both patient and control groups (Greenwood et al, ; Yang et al, ). In the recent Consortium of Genomics in Schizophrenia (COGS) study, it was reported that patients with schizophrenia with a higher PPI also had better working memory performances compared with those with a low PPI (Swerdlow et al, ).…”

Impact of childhood trauma on sensory gating in patients with first-episode schizophrenia

“…We described the detailed measurement procedures in our other published articles (Fig. 1 ) [ 24 ].

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“…Trials in each block were presented randomly with the inter-trial interval about 20 s. Note: RNRP (RNLP): right leading masking with prepulse co-location (separation); LNLP (LNRP): left leading masking with prepulse co-location (separation). We have published this paradigm in our privous paper ([ 24 ]) …”