The University of Texas Health Science Center, Houston, TX, United States.
Schizophr Res. 2012 Jul;138(2-3):113-9. doi: 10.1016/j.schres.2012.03.016. Epub 2012 Apr 4.
Self-awareness (SA) is one of the core domains of higher cortical functions and is frequently compromised in schizophrenia. Deficits in SA have been associated with functional and psychosocial impairment in this patient population. However, despite its clinical significance, only a few studies have examined the neural substrates of self-referential processing in schizophrenia. The aim of this study was to assess self-awareness in schizophrenia using a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) paradigm designed to elicit judgments of self-reference in a simulated social context. While scanned, volunteers looked at visually-displayed sentences that had the volunteer's own first name (self-directed sentence-stimulus) or an unknown other person's first name (other-directed sentence stimulus) as the grammatical subject of the sentence. The volunteers were asked to discern whether each sentence-stimulus was about the volunteer personally (during a self-referential cue epoch) or asked whether each statement was about someone else (during an other-referential cue epoch). We predicted that individuals with schizophrenia would demonstrate altered functional activation to self- and other-directed sentence-stimuli as compared to controls. Fifteen controls and seventeen schizophrenia volunteers completed clinical assessments and SA fMRI task on a 3T Philips 3.0 T Achieva system. The results showed significantly greater activation in schizophrenia compared to controls for cortical midline structures in response to self- vs. other-directed sentence-stimuli. These findings support results from earlier studies and demonstrate selective alteration in the activation of cortical midline structures associated with evaluations of self-reference in schizophrenia as compared to controls.
自我意识（SA）是高级皮质功能的核心领域之一，在精神分裂症中经常受到损害。自我意识缺陷与该患者群体的功能和社会心理障碍有关。然而，尽管其具有临床意义，但仅有少数研究检查了精神分裂症中自我参照处理的神经基础。本研究旨在使用功能磁共振成像（fMRI）范式评估精神分裂症中的自我意识，该范式旨在在模拟的社会环境中引发自我参照判断。在扫描过程中，志愿者观看视觉显示的句子，这些句子的主语是志愿者自己的名字（自我指导的句子刺激）或一个不知名的其他人的名字（他人指导的句子刺激）。志愿者被要求辨别每个句子刺激是否与志愿者个人有关（在自我参照提示期间）或询问每个陈述是否与他人有关（在他人参照提示期间）。我们预测，与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者对自我和他人指导的句子刺激的功能激活会发生改变。十五名对照者和十七名精神分裂症志愿者在飞利浦 3.0T Achieva 系统上完成了临床评估和自我意识 fMRI 任务。结果显示，与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者的大脑中线结构对自我指导的句子刺激的反应明显更为活跃。这些发现支持了早期研究的结果，并证明了与自我参照评估相关的大脑中线结构的激活选择性改变，与对照组相比，精神分裂症患者存在这种改变。
