Tianjin Anding Hospital, Mental Health Center of Tianjin Medical University, Tianjin, 300222, China.
The Third People's Hospital of Tianshui, Tianshui, 741000, China.
J Psychiatr Res. 2023 Nov;167:86-92. doi: 10.1016/j.jpsychires.2023.09.021. Epub 2023 Oct 14.
Previous neuroimaging studies indicated that patients with schizophrenia showed impaired thalamus and thalamo-cortical circuits. However, the dynamic functional connectivity (dFC) patterns of the thalamus remain unclear. In this study, we explored the dFC of the thalamus in SZ patients and whether clinical features are correlated with altered dFC.
Forty-three patients with schizophrenia and 31 healthy controls underwent 3.0 T rs-fMRI. Based on the human Brainnetome atlas, the thalamus is divided into 8 subregions. Subsequently, we performed flexible least squares method to calculate the dFC of each thalamus subregions.
Compared with healthy controls, patients with schizophrenia exhibited increased dFC between the thalamus and cerebellar, visual-related cortex, sensorimotor-related cortex, and frontal lobe. In addition, we found that the dFC of the thalamus and the right fusiform gyrus was negatively associated with age of onset.
Our findings demonstrated that the dFC of specific thalamus sub-regions is altered in patients with schizophrenia. Our results further suggested the dysconnectivity of thalamus plays an important role in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia.
先前的神经影像学研究表明，精神分裂症患者的丘脑和丘脑皮质回路存在损伤。然而，丘脑的动态功能连接（dFC）模式仍不清楚。在这项研究中，我们探讨了精神分裂症患者丘脑的 dFC，以及临床特征是否与改变的 dFC 相关。
43 名精神分裂症患者和 31 名健康对照者接受了 3.0T rs-fMRI 检查。基于人类脑连接图谱，我们将丘脑分为 8 个亚区。随后，我们采用灵活最小二乘法计算每个丘脑亚区的 dFC。
与健康对照组相比，精神分裂症患者丘脑与小脑、视觉相关皮层、感觉运动相关皮层和额叶之间的 dFC 增加。此外，我们发现丘脑与右侧梭状回的 dFC 与发病年龄呈负相关。
我们的研究结果表明，精神分裂症患者特定丘脑亚区的 dFC 发生改变。我们的结果进一步表明，丘脑的失连接在精神分裂症的病理生理学中起着重要作用。
