IRCCS 'Casa Sollievo della Sofferenza', San Giovanni Rotondo, Foggia, Italy.
Psychol Med. 2013 Aug;43(8):1661-71. doi: 10.1017/S0033291712002413. Epub 2012 Oct 31.
Abnormalities in hippocampal-parahippocampal (H-PH) function are prominent features of schizophrenia and have been associated with deficits in episodic memory. However, it remains unclear whether these abnormalities represent a phenotype related to genetic risk for schizophrenia or whether they are related to disease state.
We investigated H-PH-mediated behavior and physiology, using blood oxygenation level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD fMRI), during episodic memory in a sample of patients with schizophrenia, clinically unaffected siblings and healthy subjects.
Patients with schizophrenia and unaffected siblings displayed abnormalities in episodic memory performance. During an fMRI memory encoding task, both patients and siblings demonstrated a similar pattern of reduced H-PH engagement compared with healthy subjects.
Our findings suggest that the pathophysiological mechanism underlying the inability of patients with schizophrenia to properly engage the H-PH during episodic memory is related to genetic risk for the disorder. Therefore, H-PH dysfunction can be assumed as a schizophrenia susceptibility-related phenotype.
海马-旁海马（H-PH）功能异常是精神分裂症的突出特征，并且与情景记忆缺陷有关。然而，目前尚不清楚这些异常是否代表与精神分裂症遗传风险相关的表型，或者它们是否与疾病状态有关。
我们使用血氧水平依赖功能磁共振成像（BOLD fMRI），研究了精神分裂症患者、临床未受影响的兄弟姐妹和健康受试者在情景记忆期间的 H-PH 介导的行为和生理学。
精神分裂症患者和未受影响的兄弟姐妹表现出情景记忆表现异常。在 fMRI 记忆编码任务中，患者和兄弟姐妹与健康受试者相比，H-PH 参与度均降低。
我们的研究结果表明，精神分裂症患者在情景记忆期间无法正确参与 H-PH 的病理生理机制与该疾病的遗传风险有关。因此，H-PH 功能障碍可以被假定为一种与精神分裂症易感性相关的表型。
