Chen Yue, Bidwell L Cinnamon, Holzman Philip S
Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School, USA.
Schizophr Res. 2005 May 1;74(2-3):271-81. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2004.04.002.
Many schizophrenia patients show degraded detection of coherent motion. This visual deficit may (1) be a consequence of having a specifically schizophrenic psychosis, (2) be a non-specific effect of suffering from a severe illness (i.e., "generalized deficit"), or (3) reflect properties of the visual motion processing system that play an antecedent, possibly causal role in the pathophysiology of a disposition to schizophrenia. To distinguish among these possibilities, we measured the accuracy of detecting the direction of coherent motion in 29 schizophrenia patients, 20 first-degree relatives of schizophrenia patients, 19 patients with bipolar disorder and 33 normal controls. The task requires the integration of dynamic signals from stochastic random dot patterns in order to discern the direction of their motion. Schizophrenia patients, as a group, showed significantly elevated thresholds for detecting the direction of coherent motion, but relatives of schizophrenia patients and patients with bipolar disorder did not differ from normal controls on this task. The results indicate that visual motion integration, normally mediated in motion-sensitive brain areas such as the Middle Temporal Area, is impaired in patients with a clinically manifest schizophrenic psychosis, but is intact in patients with a non-schizophrenic psychosis (bipolar disorder) and in the relatives of schizophrenia patients. Our findings suggest that deficiencies in integrating motion signals, while specific for schizophrenia, do not seem to be a co-familial trait.
许多精神分裂症患者表现出对连贯运动的检测能力下降。这种视觉缺陷可能（1）是患有特定精神分裂症性精神病的结果，（2）是患有严重疾病的非特异性效应（即“全身性缺陷”），或者（3）反映了视觉运动处理系统的特性，这些特性在精神分裂症易感性的病理生理学中起先行的、可能是因果性的作用。为了区分这些可能性，我们测量了29名精神分裂症患者、20名精神分裂症患者的一级亲属、19名双相情感障碍患者和33名正常对照者检测连贯运动方向的准确性。该任务需要整合来自随机随机点模式的动态信号，以便辨别其运动方向。作为一个群体，精神分裂症患者在检测连贯运动方向时表现出显著升高的阈值，但精神分裂症患者的亲属和双相情感障碍患者在这项任务上与正常对照者没有差异。结果表明，通常在诸如颞中区等对运动敏感的脑区介导的视觉运动整合，在患有临床表现为精神分裂症性精神病的患者中受损，但在患有非精神分裂症性精神病（双相情感障碍）的患者和精神分裂症患者的亲属中是完整的。我们的研究结果表明，运动信号整合缺陷虽然是精神分裂症特有的，但似乎不是一种共同家族特征。
