López S Guerra, Fuster J Iglesias, Reyes M Martín, Collazo T M Bravo, Quiñones R Mendoza, Berazain A Reyes, Rodríguez M A Pedroso, Días de Villarvilla T, Bobés M Antonieta, Valdés-Sosa M
Department of Biological Psychiatry, Cuban Neuroscience Center, Havana, Cuba.
Actas Esp Psiquiatr. 2011 Jan-Feb;39(1):32-44. Epub 2011 Jan 1.
In recent years, reports of attentional deficits in schizophrenic patients and in their biological relatives have rapidly increased, including an important effort to search for the endophenotypes in order to link specific genes to this illness. Posner et al. developed a test, the Attention Network Test (ANT), to study the neural networks. This test provides a separate measure for each one of the three anatomically-defined attention networks (alerting, orienting and executive control).
In this paper, we investigate the attentional performance in 32 schizophrenic patients, 29 unaffected first degree relatives and 29 healthy controls using the ANT through a study of family association. We have studied the efficiency of the segregated executive control, alerting and orienting networks by measuring how response latencies (reaction time) were modified by the cue position and the flanking stimuli. We also studied the familial association of these attentional alterations.
The ANOVA revealed main effects of flanker and cue condition and a significant interaction effect between flanker and groups studied. The schizophrenic patients and their relatives had a longer median reaction time than the control group. The probands and their relatives significantly differed from the healthy controls in terms of their conflict resolution; however, the alerting network appeared to be conserved.
Our results support the thesis of a specific attentional deficit in schizophrenia and show the segregation of the three attentional networks. The family association of these reported alterations supports the idea of a potential endophenotype in schizophrenia.
近年来，关于精神分裂症患者及其生物学亲属注意力缺陷的报道迅速增加，其中包括为寻找内表型以将特定基因与该疾病联系起来所做的重要努力。波斯纳等人开发了一种测试，即注意力网络测试（ANT），用于研究神经网络。该测试为三个解剖学定义的注意力网络（警觉、定向和执行控制）中的每一个提供单独的测量。
在本文中，我们通过家族关联研究，使用ANT对32名精神分裂症患者、29名未患病的一级亲属和29名健康对照者的注意力表现进行了调查。我们通过测量线索位置和侧翼刺激如何改变反应潜伏期（反应时间），研究了分离的执行控制、警觉和定向网络的效率。我们还研究了这些注意力改变的家族关联。
方差分析显示了侧翼刺激和线索条件的主效应以及侧翼刺激与所研究组之间的显著交互效应。精神分裂症患者及其亲属的中位反应时间比对照组更长。先证者及其亲属在冲突解决方面与健康对照者有显著差异；然而，警觉网络似乎是保守的。
我们的结果支持精神分裂症存在特定注意力缺陷的论点，并显示了三个注意力网络的分离。这些报道的改变的家族关联支持了精神分裂症潜在内表型的观点。
