Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Neurobiology, University of Alabama at Birmingham, Birmingham, Alabama, USA.
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Georgia Tech and Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia, USA.
Hum Brain Mapp. 2020 Aug 1;41(11):2999-3008. doi: 10.1002/hbm.24992. Epub 2020 May 6.
Psychotic disorders are disabling clinical syndromes characterized by widespread alterations in cortical information processing. Disruption of frontoparietal network (FPN) connectivity has emerged as a common footprint across the psychosis spectrum. Our goal was to characterize the static and dynamic resting-state functional connectivity (FC) of the FPN in antipsychotic-naïve first-episode psychosis (FEP) subjects. We compared the static FC of the FPN in 40 FEP and 40 healthy control (HC) subjects, matched on age, sex, and socioeconomic status. To study the dynamic FC, we measured quasiperiodic patterns (QPPs) that consist of infraslow spatioemporal patterns embedded in the blood oxygen level-dependent signal that repeats over time, exhibiting alternation of high and low activity. Relative to HC, we found functional hypoconnectivity between the right middle frontal gyrus and the right middle temporal gyrus, as well as the left inferior temporal gyrus and the left inferior parietal gyrus in FEP (p < .05, false discovery rate corrected). The correlation of the QPP with all functional scans was significantly stronger for FEP compared to HC, suggesting a greater impact of the QPPs to intrinsic brain activity in psychotic population. Regressing the QPP from the functional scans erased all significant group differences in static FC, suggesting that abnormal connectivity in FEP could result from altered QPP. Our study supports that alterations of cortical information processing are not a function of psychotic chronicity or antipsychotic medication exposure and may be regarded as trait specific. In addition, static connectivity abnormality may be partly related to altered brain network temporal dynamics.
精神病性障碍是一种致残的临床综合征，其特征为皮质信息处理广泛改变。前额顶网络（FPN）连接中断已成为整个精神病谱中的常见特征。我们的目标是描述未经抗精神病药物治疗的首发精神病（FEP）患者 FPN 的静息态功能连接（FC）的静态和动态特征。我们比较了 40 名 FEP 和 40 名健康对照组（HC）受试者的 FPN 静息态 FC，这些受试者在年龄、性别和社会经济地位方面相匹配。为了研究动态 FC，我们测量了准周期性模式（QPP），这些模式由依赖血氧水平的信号中嵌入的超慢时空模式组成，随着时间的推移重复出现，表现出高活动和低活动的交替。与 HC 相比，我们发现 FEP 中右侧额中回和右侧颞中回之间以及左侧颞下回和左侧顶下小叶之间的功能连接性降低（p <.05，经假发现率校正）。与 HC 相比，FEP 中 QPP 与所有功能扫描的相关性更强，这表明 QPP 对精神病患者大脑活动的内在影响更大。将 QPP 从功能扫描中回归消除了静息态 FC 中所有显著的组间差异，这表明 FEP 中的异常连接可能是由 QPP 改变引起的。我们的研究支持皮质信息处理的改变不是精神病慢性或抗精神病药物暴露的功能，并且可能被视为特质特异性。此外，静态连接异常可能部分与改变的大脑网络时间动态有关。
