Joo Sung Woo, Jo Young Tak, Ahn Soojin, Choi Young Jae, Choi Woohyeok, Kim Sang Kyoung, Joe Soohyun, Lee Jungsun
Department of Psychiatry, Asan Medical Center, University of Ulsan College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Department of Psychiatry, Kangdong Sacred Heart Hospital, Hallym University College of Medicine, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
Acta Neuropsychiatr. 2023 Aug 25;37:e24. doi: 10.1017/neu.2023.44.
Although disconnectivity among brain regions has been one of the main hypotheses for schizophrenia, the superficial white matter (SWM) has received less attention in schizophrenia research than the deep white matter (DWM) owing to the challenge of consistent reconstruction across subjects.
We obtained the diffusion magnetic resonance imaging (dMRI) data of 223 healthy controls and 143 patients with schizophrenia. After harmonising the raw dMRIs from three different studies, we performed whole-brain two-tensor tractography and fibre clustering on the tractography data. We compared the fractional anisotropy (FA) of white matter tracts between healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia. Spearman's rho was adopted for the associations with clinical symptoms measured by the Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The Bonferroni correction was used to adjust multiple testing.
Among the 33 DWM and 8 SWM tracts, patients with schizophrenia had a lower FA in 14 DWM and 4 SWM tracts than healthy controls, with small effect sizes. In the patient group, the FA deviations of the corticospinal and superficial-occipital tracts were negatively correlated with the PANSS negative score; however, this correlation was not evident after adjusting for multiple testing.
We observed the structural impairments of both the DWM and SWM tracts in patients with schizophrenia. The SWM could be a potential target of interest in future research on neural biomarkers for schizophrenia.
尽管脑区之间的连接性中断一直是精神分裂症的主要假说之一，但由于跨个体进行一致性重建存在挑战，在精神分裂症研究中，浅表层白质（SWM）比深层白质（DWM）受到的关注更少。
我们获取了223名健康对照者和143名精神分裂症患者的扩散磁共振成像（dMRI）数据。在对来自三项不同研究的原始dMRI数据进行协调后，我们对全脑进行了双张量纤维束成像，并对纤维束成像数据进行了纤维聚类。我们比较了健康对照者和精神分裂症患者之间白质纤维束的各向异性分数（FA）。采用斯皮尔曼等级相关系数来分析与阳性和阴性症状量表（PANSS）所测量的临床症状之间的关联。采用邦费罗尼校正来调整多重检验。
在33条DWM纤维束和8条SWM纤维束中，精神分裂症患者的14条DWM纤维束和4条SWM纤维束的FA低于健康对照者，效应量较小。在患者组中，皮质脊髓束和枕颞浅束的FA偏差与PANSS阴性评分呈负相关；然而，在调整多重检验后，这种相关性并不明显。
我们观察到精神分裂症患者的DWM和SWM纤维束均存在结构损伤。SWM可能是未来精神分裂症神经生物标志物研究中一个潜在的感兴趣靶点。
