Department of Psychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, Nagoya University, 65 Tsurumai, Showa-ku, Nagoya, Aichi 466-8550, Japan.
Schizophr Res. 2012 Feb;134(2-3):137-42. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2011.10.024. Epub 2011 Nov 23.
The etiology of schizophrenia has been proposed to be neurodevelopmental based on neuroimaging and molecular biological studies. If there is neuronal vulnerability based on neurodevelopment failures in schizophrenic brains, then the impact of aging may have a greater effect on schizophrenic brains than on normal brains. To determine the impact of aging on schizophrenic brains, we investigated the age-related morphological changes of the cross-sectional area of the gray matter (GM) in the left Heschl's gyrus (HG) and the left superior gyrus (STG) in 22 schizophrenic and 24 age- and sex-matched normal control postmortem brains two-dimensionally. The subject groups were divided into younger groups (30-54years of age) and older groups (65-84years of age) on the basis of age at death. Both in schizophrenic and control subjects, the GM area in HG and the STG was significantly smaller in the older group than in the younger group, however, no significant differences were observed between the schizophrenic and control subjects. In the STG, the cross-sectional area of the white matter (WM) was also measured. In the older group, the ratio of the GM area to the WM area in the STG was significantly larger in schizophrenic subjects than controls, although there was no significant difference between the schizophrenic and control subjects in the younger group. These findings indicate that the impact of aging has a greater effect on the WM in the STG in schizophrenic subjects than in normal individuals, although the pathological basis is still unclear.
精神分裂症的病因学基于神经影像学和分子生物学研究被认为是神经发育性的。如果精神分裂症大脑中存在基于神经发育失败的神经元易损性，那么衰老的影响可能对精神分裂症大脑比对正常大脑的影响更大。为了确定衰老对精神分裂症大脑的影响，我们二维地研究了 22 例精神分裂症和 24 例年龄和性别匹配的正常对照尸检大脑左侧 Heschl 回（HG）和左侧上回（STG）的灰质（GM）横截面积的年龄相关形态变化。根据死亡时的年龄，将受试者分为年轻组（30-54 岁）和老年组（65-84 岁）。在 HG 和 STG 中，GM 面积在老年组明显小于年轻组，无论是在精神分裂症患者还是在对照组中，然而，在精神分裂症患者和对照组之间没有观察到显著差异。在 STG 中，还测量了白质（WM）的横截面积。在老年组中，STG 中 GM 面积与 WM 面积的比值在精神分裂症患者中明显大于对照组，尽管在年轻组中，精神分裂症患者和对照组之间没有显著差异。这些发现表明，衰老的影响对精神分裂症患者的 STG 中的 WM 有更大的影响，尽管其病理基础仍不清楚。
