Leitman David I, Loughead James, Wolf Daniel H, Ruparel Kosha, Kohler Christian G, Elliott Mark A, Bilker Warren B, Gur Raquel E, Gur Ruben C
Department of Psychiatry-Neuropsychiatry Program, Brain Behavior Laboratory, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104-4283, USA.
Schizophr Bull. 2008 Jul;34(4):673-8. doi: 10.1093/schbul/sbn052. Epub 2008 Jun 11.
Patients with schizophrenia have difficulty in decoding facial affect. A study using event-related functional neuroimaging indicated that errors in fear detection in schizophrenia are associated with paradoxically higher activation in the amygdala and an associated network implicated in threat detection. Furthermore, this exaggerated activation to fearful faces correlated with severity of flat affect. These findings suggest that abnormal threat detection processing may reflect disruptions between nodes that comprise the affective appraisal circuit. Here we examined connectivity within this network by determining the pattern of intercorrelations among brain regions (regions of interest) significantly activated during fear identification in both healthy controls and patients using a novel procedure CORANOVA. This analysis tests differences in the interregional correlation strength between schizophrenia and healthy controls. Healthy subjects' task activation was principally characterized by robust correlations between medial structures like thalamus (THA) and amygdala (AMY) and middle frontal (MF), inferior frontal (IF), and prefrontal cortical (PFC) regions. In contrast, schizophrenia patients displayed no significant correlations between the medial regions and either MF or IF. Further, patients had significantly higher correlations between occipital lingual gyrus and superior temporal gyrus than healthy subjects. These between-group connectivity differences suggest that schizophrenia threat detection impairment may stem from abnormal stimulus integration. Such abnormal integration may disrupt the evaluation of threat within fronto-cortical regions.
精神分裂症患者在解读面部表情方面存在困难。一项使用事件相关功能神经成像的研究表明，精神分裂症患者在恐惧检测中的错误与杏仁核及参与威胁检测的相关网络中反常的更高激活有关。此外，这种对恐惧面孔的过度激活与情感平淡的严重程度相关。这些发现表明，异常的威胁检测处理可能反映了构成情感评估回路的节点之间的中断。在这里，我们通过使用一种新颖的程序CORANOVA来确定健康对照者和患者在恐惧识别过程中显著激活的脑区（感兴趣区域）之间的相互关联模式，从而研究该网络内的连通性。该分析测试了精神分裂症患者和健康对照者之间区域间相关强度的差异。健康受试者的任务激活主要表现为丘脑（THA）和杏仁核（AMY）等内侧结构与额中回（MF）、额下回（IF）及前额叶皮质（PFC）区域之间的强烈相关性。相比之下，精神分裂症患者在内侧区域与MF或IF之间未显示出显著相关性。此外，患者枕叶舌回与颞上回之间的相关性显著高于健康受试者。这些组间连通性差异表明，精神分裂症患者的威胁检测受损可能源于异常的刺激整合。这种异常整合可能会扰乱额叶皮质区域内对威胁的评估。
