Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands.
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Psychol Med. 2023 Apr;53(6):2370-2379. doi: 10.1017/S0033291721004244. Epub 2021 Nov 17.
Psychotic-like experiences (PLEs) are risk factors for the development of psychiatric conditions like schizophrenia, particularly if associated with distress. As PLEs have been related to alterations in both white matter and cognition, we investigated whether cognition (g-factor and processing speed) mediates the relationship between white matter and PLEs.
We investigated two independent samples (6170 and 19 891) from the UK Biobank, through path analysis. For both samples, measures of whole-brain fractional anisotropy (gFA) and mean diffusivity (gMD), as indications of white matter microstructure, were derived from probabilistic tractography. For the smaller sample, variables whole-brain white matter network efficiency and microstructure were also derived from structural connectome data.
The mediation of cognition on the relationships between white matter properties and PLEs was non-significant. However, lower gFA was associated with having PLEs in combination with distress in the full available sample (standardized = -0.053, = 0.011). Additionally, lower gFA/higher gMD was associated with lower g-factor (standardized = 0.049, < 0.001; standardized = -0.027, = 0.003), and partially mediated by processing speed with a proportion mediated of 7% ( = < 0.001) for gFA and 11% ( < 0.001) for gMD.
We show that lower global white matter microstructure is associated with having PLEs in combination with distress, which suggests a direction of future research that could help clarify how and why individuals progress from subclinical to clinical psychotic symptoms. Furthermore, we replicated that processing speed mediates the relationship between white matter microstructure and g-factor.
类精神病体验（PLE）是精神疾病（如精神分裂症）发展的风险因素，尤其是如果与痛苦相关。由于 PLE 与白质和认知的改变有关，我们研究了认知（g 因素和处理速度）是否介导了白质和 PLE 之间的关系。
我们通过路径分析研究了来自英国生物库的两个独立样本（6170 个和 19891 个）。对于两个样本，全脑分数各向异性（gFA）和平均弥散度（gMD）的测量值，作为白质微观结构的指标，都是从概率追踪中得出的。对于较小的样本，还从结构连接组数据中得出了全脑白质网络效率和微观结构的变量。
认知对白质特性与 PLE 之间关系的中介作用不显著。然而，在全样本中，较低的 gFA 与 PLE 同时伴有痛苦有关（标准化 = -0.053， = 0.011）。此外，较低的 gFA/较高的 gMD 与较低的 g 因素有关（标准化 = 0.049， < 0.001；标准化 = -0.027， = 0.003），并且部分由处理速度介导，gFA 的中介比例为 7%（ < 0.001），gMD 的中介比例为 11%（ < 0.001）。
我们表明，较低的全脑白质微观结构与 PLE 同时伴有痛苦有关，这表明未来的研究方向可以帮助阐明个体如何以及为何从亚临床精神病症状进展为临床精神病症状。此外，我们复制了处理速度介导了白质微观结构和 g 因素之间的关系。
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