fMRI helps find schizophrenia symptoms

Researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard University are using functional MRI (fMRI) to help explain the cognitive and psychological symptoms of schizophrenia.

In a study published online in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers concluded that schizophrenia may blur the boundary between internal and external realities by overactivating a brain system that is involved in self-reflection, thus causing an exaggerated focus on self.

Schizophrenia involves excess connectivity between so-called default brain regions, which are involved in self-reflection and become active when we are thinking about nothing in particular, or thinking about ourselves.

Lead author John Gabrieli, Ph.D., a professor in the McGovern Institute for Brain Research at MIT, hopes the research might lead to ways of predicting or monitoring individual patients' response to treatments for this mental illness, which occurs in approximately 1% of the population.

The researchers studied three carefully matched groups: schizophrenia patients, nonpsychotic first-degree relatives of patients, and healthy controls. Each group consisted of 13 subjects.

The study participants were scanned by fMRI while resting and while performing easy or hard memory tasks. The researchers found that in the schizophrenia patients, the default system was both hyperactive and hyperconnected during rest and it remained so as they performed the memory tasks.

The conclusion was that schizophrenia patients were less able than healthy control subjects to suppress the activity of this network during the task. Also, the less the suppression and the greater the connectivity, the worse they performed on the hard memory task and the more severe their clinical symptoms.

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