Reavis Eric A, Lee Junghee, Wynn Jonathan K, Engel Stephen A, Jimenez Amy M, Green Michael F
Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Desert Pacific Mental Illness Research, Education, and Clinical Center, Greater Los Angeles Veterans Affairs Healthcare System, Los Angeles, CA, USA.
Cereb Cortex. 2017 May 1;27(5):2984-2993. doi: 10.1093/cercor/bhw151.
Patients with schizophrenia show specific abnormalities in visual perception, and patients with bipolar disorder may have related perceptual deficits. During tasks that highlight perceptual dysfunction, patients with schizophrenia show abnormal activity in visual brain areas, including the lateral occipital complex (LOC) and early retinotopic cortex. It is unclear whether the anatomical structure of those visual areas is atypical in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. In members of those two patient groups and healthy controls, we localized LOC and early retinotopic cortex individually for each participant using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), then measured the thickness of those regions of interest using structural MRI scans. In both regions, patients with schizophrenia had the thinnest cortex, controls had the thickest cortex, and bipolar patients had intermediate cortical thickness. A control region, motor cortex, did not show this pattern of group differences. The thickness of each visual region of interest was significantly correlated with performance on a visual object masking task, but only in schizophrenia patients. These findings suggest an anatomical substrate for visual processing abnormalities that have been found with both neural and behavioral measures in schizophrenia and other severe mental illnesses.
精神分裂症患者在视觉感知方面表现出特定异常，双相情感障碍患者可能存在相关的感知缺陷。在突出感知功能障碍的任务中，精神分裂症患者在视觉脑区表现出异常活动，包括枕外侧复合体（LOC）和早期视网膜拓扑皮层。尚不清楚在精神分裂症和双相情感障碍中，这些视觉区域的解剖结构是否异常。在这两组患者和健康对照者中，我们使用功能磁共振成像（MRI）为每个参与者分别定位LOC和早期视网膜拓扑皮层，然后使用结构MRI扫描测量这些感兴趣区域的厚度。在这两个区域中，精神分裂症患者的皮层最薄，对照组患者的皮层最厚，双相情感障碍患者的皮层厚度居中。一个对照区域，即运动皮层，未显示出这种组间差异模式。每个感兴趣的视觉区域的厚度与视觉物体掩蔽任务的表现显著相关，但仅在精神分裂症患者中如此。这些发现提示了视觉加工异常的解剖学基础，这在精神分裂症和其他严重精神疾病的神经和行为测量中均有发现。
