fMRI study of language activation in schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder and in individuals genetically at high risk

Abstract

Background: Structural and functional abnormalities have been found in language-related brain regions in patients with schizophrenia. We previously reported findings pointing to differences in word processing between people with schizophrenia and individuals who are at high-risk for schizophrenia using a voxel-based (whole brain) fMRI approach. We now extend this finding to specifically examine functional activity in three language related cortical regions using a larger cohort of individuals.

Do Subjects at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis Differ from those with a Genetic High Risk? - A Systematic Review of Structural and Functional Brain Abnormalities

“…Loss of lateralization in inferior frontal and superior temporal gyri and in parietal lobuli was based on reduced left hemispheric activation in the G-HR subjects, while it was due to increased right side activation in the SCZ group [41]. Compared to the HC, G-HR showed no differences [33] or activated less in language related regions [41], in inferior frontal gyri [35,42], in the cingulate, dorsolateral prefrontal and posterior parietal cortex (especially Val/Val carriers during retrieval [13]).…”

“…All but one [33] of the 13 included studies with G-HR were cross-sectional and mostly examined verbal memory [13, 33-35, 41, 42, 45, 68] and working memory [36,38,43] (Table 2). Five studies based on an overlapping sample from the Edinburgh High Risk Study [13,[32][33][34][35], further six were conducted in the USA [36,37,[40][41][42][43] and further two in Asia [38,45]. We are presenting them according to the studied cognitive domain and possibly similar affected brain regions ( Table 4).…”

“…Hayling sentence completion task [33,34], verbal encoding and recognition tasks [13,35] and lexical comprehension and discrimination tasks [41,42] were used to engage verbal memory domain, especially in language-related areas, in the inferior and medial superior frontal cortex and insula and in superior and middle temporal gyri together with thalamus, hippocampus, basal ganglia and parietal lobes. The six included studies found no behavioral differences.…”

Reduced Laterality as a Trait Marker ofSchizophrenia—Evidence from Structural and Functional Neuroimaging

“…Hemispheric laterality in relatives of schizophrenia patients has mainly been investigated with functional imaging during language tasks. Sommer et al (2004), Whyte et al (2006), and Li et al (2007) reported significantly de-creased lateralization of activity in the inferior frontal gyrus, caused by higher right (Sommer et al, 2004;Whyte et al, 2006) or lower left (Li et al, 2007) frontal activation. Structural imaging has so far focused on medial temporal asymmetry (Keshavan et al, 2002).…”

Zebrafish and medaka: model organisms for a comparative developmental approach of brain asymmetry

“…In addition, asymmetry has been proposed as the basis of speech and other behavioural traits (Sherman et al 1982;Rogers & Andrew 2002;Hutsler & Galuske 2003;Toga & Thompson 2003) and abnormal asymmetry appears to associate with several neuropathologies including schizophrenia (Li et al 2007), autism (Escalante-Mead et al 2003) and neuronal degenerative diseases (Toth et al 2004). In the last decade, experimental studies have provided valuable insights into the developmental basis of brain asymmetry.…”