Insula and schizophrenia

BACKGROUND: Individuals with psychosis spectrum disorders (PSD) have difficulty developing social relationships. This difficulty may reflect reduced response to social feedback involving functional alterations in brain regions that support the social motivation system: ventral striatum, orbital frontal cortex, insula, dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and amygdala. Whether these alterations span PSD is unknown. METHODS: 71 individuals with PSD, 27 unaffected siblings, and 37 control participants completed a team-based fMRI task...

BACKGROUND: Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) is one of the most effective treatments for depression and schizophrenia, particularly in urgent or treatment-resistant cases. After ECT, regional gray matter volume (GMV) increases have been repeatedly reported both in depression and schizophrenia. However, the interpretation of these findings remains entangled because GMV changes do not necessarily correlate with treatment effects and may be influenced by the intervention itself. We hypothesized that the comparison of longitudinal magnetic resonance imaging data between the two diagnostic groups will provide clues to distinguish diagnosis-specific and transdiagnostic changes...

Stress is an important factor in the development, triggering, and maintenance of psychotic symptoms. Still, little is known about the neural correlates of cognitively regulating stressful events in schizophrenia. The current study aimed at investigating the cognitive down-regulation of negative, stressful reactions during a neuroimaging psychosocial stress paradigm (non-regulated stress versus cognitively regulated stress). In a randomized, repeated-measures within-subject design, we assessed subjective reactions and neural activation in schizophrenia patients (SZP) and matched healthy controls in a neuroimaging psychosocial stress paradigm...

BACKGROUND: Self-directed performance monitoring is a critical contributor to cognitive performance and general functioning and is impacted by psychiatric symptoms and personality traits, but has been understudied in psychosis-risk states. We have shown that ventral striatum (VS) responds to correctness during cognitive tasks where no explicit feedback is required, and this intrinsic reinforcement response is reduced in schizophrenia. METHODS: Here, we examined this phenomenon in youths (n = 796, age range 11-22 years) from the Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort (PNC) performing a working memory functional magnetic resonance imaging task...

UNLABELLED: Abstract . BACKGROUND: Patients with schizophrenia experience cognitive impairment, which could be related to neuroinflammation in the hippocampus. The cause for such hippocampal inflammation is still unknown, but it has been suggested that herpes virus infection is involved. This study therefore aimed to determine whether add-on treatment of schizophrenic patients with the anti- viral drug valaciclovir would reduce hippocampal neuroinflammation and consequently improve cognitive symptoms...

Interoception refers to the processing, integration, and interpretation of bodily signals by the brain. Interoception is key to not only basic survival, but also motivational and affective functioning. There is emerging evidence suggesting altered interoception in schizophrenia, but few studies have explored potential neural underpinnings. The current study aims to investigate the anatomical connectivity of a previously identified interoception network in individuals with schizophrenia, and the relationship between network structural connectivity and both emotional functioning and clinical symptoms...

BACKGROUND: Abnormal reward functioning is central to anhedonia and amotivation symptoms of schizophrenia (SCZ). Reward processing encompasses a series of psychological components. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the brain dysfunction related to reward processing of individuals with SCZ spectrum disorders and risks, covering multiple reward components. METHODS: After a systematic literature search, 37 neuroimaging studies were identified and divided into four groups based on their target psychology components (i...

Affective reactivity to daily stressors are increased in individuals in the early stages of psychosis. Studies in psychosis patients and healthy individuals at increased psychosis risk show altered neural reactivity to stress in limbic (i.e., hippocampus [HC] and amygdala), prelimbic (i.e., ventromedial prefrontal cortex [vmPFC] and ventral anterior cingulate cortex [vACC]), and salience areas (i.e., Anterior Insula [AI]). We investigated whether a similar pattern of neural reactivity is present in early psychosis individuals and if brain activity in these regions is associated with daily-life stress reactivity...

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Active inference has become an influential concept in psychopathology. We apply active inference to investigate conceptual disorganization in first-episode schizophrenia. We conceptualize speech production as a decision-making process affected by the latent "conceptual organization"-as a special case of uncertainty about the causes of sensory information. Uncertainty is both minimized via speech production-in which function words index conceptual organization in terms of analytic thinking-and tracked by a domain-general salience network...

Evidence highlights that dopamine (DA) system dysregulation and prefrontal cortex (PFC) dysfunction may underlie the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. However, the associations among DA genes, PFC morphometry, and schizophrenia have not yet been fully clarified. Based on the brain gene expression dataset from Allen Human Brain Atlas and structural magnetic resonance imaging data (NDIS = 1727, NREP = 408), we first identified 10 out of 22 PFC subregions whose gray matter volume (GMV) covariance profiles were reliably associated with their DA genes coexpression profiles, then four out of the identified 10 PFC subregions demonstrated abnormally increased GMV covariance with the hippocampus, insula, and medial frontal areas in schizophrenia patients (NCASE = 100; NCONTROL = 102)...

Ketamine administration leads to a psychotomimetic state when taken in large bolus doses, making it a valid model of psychosis. Therefore, understanding ketamine's effects on brain functioning is particularly relevant. This meta-analysis focused on neuroimaging studies that examined ketamine-induced brain activation at rest and during a task. Included are 10 resting-state studies and 23 task-based studies, 9 of which were measuring executive functions. Using a stringent statistical threshold (TFCE <0.05), the results showed increased activity at rest in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and increased activation of the right Heschl's gyrus during executive tasks, following ketamine administration...

BACKGROUND: Aberrant striatal responses to reward anticipation have been observed in schizophrenia. However, it is unclear whether these dysfunctions predate the onset of psychosis and whether reward anticipation is impaired in individuals at clinical high risk for schizophrenia (CHR). METHODS: To examine the neural correlates of monetary anticipation in the prodromal phase of schizophrenia, we performed a whole-brain meta-analysis of 13 functional neuroimaging studies that compared reward anticipation signals between CHR individuals and healthy controls (HC)...

Although many studies on brain-age prediction in patients with schizophrenia have been reported recently, none has predicted brain age based on different neuroimaging modalities and different brain regions in these patients. Here, we constructed brain-age prediction models with multimodal MRI and examined the deviations of aging trajectories in different brain regions of participants with schizophrenia recruited from multiple centers. The data of 230 healthy controls (HCs) were used for model training. Next, we investigated the differences in brain age gaps between participants with schizophrenia and HCs from two independent cohorts...

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Risk-taking in specific contexts can be beneficial, leading to rewarding outcomes. Schizophrenia is associated with disadvantageous decision-making, as subjects pursue uncertain risky rewards less than controls. However, it is unclear whether this behavior is associated with more risk sensitivity or less reward incentivization. Matching on demographics and intelligence quotient (IQ), we determined whether risk-taking was more associated with brain activation in regions affiliated with risk evaluation or reward processing...

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Impairments in the expression, experience, and recognition of emotion are common in early psychosis (EP). Computational accounts of psychosis suggest disrupted top-down modulation by the cognitive control system (CCS) on perceptual circuits underlies psychotic experiences, but their role in emotional deficits in EP is unknown. STUDY DESIGN: The affective go/no-go task was used to probe inhibitory control during the presentation of calm or fearful faces in young persons with EP and matched controls...

Von Economo neurons (VENs) are rod, stick, or corkscrew cells mostly located in layer V of the frontoinsular and anterior cingulate cortices. VENs are projection neurons related to human-like social cognitive abilities. Post-mortem histological studies found VEN alterations in several neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia (SZ). This pilot study aimed to evaluate the role of VEN-containing areas in shaping patterns of resting-state brain activation in patients with SZ (n = 20) compared to healthy controls (HCs; n = 20)...

Our study aimed to examine the shared and distinct structural brain alterations, including cortical thickness(CT) and local gyrification index(LGI), and cognitive impairments between the early course stage of drug-naïve schizophrenia(SZ) and bipolar disorder(BD) patients when compared to healthy controls(HCs), and to further explore the correlation between altered brain structure and cognitive impairments. We included 72 SZ patients, 35 BD patients and 43 HCs. The cognitive function was assessed using the MATRICS Consensus Cognitive Battery...

Brain network models of cognitive control are central to advancing our understanding of psychopathology and cognitive dysfunction in schizophrenia. This review examines the role of large-scale brain organization in schizophrenia, with a particular focus on a triple-network model of cognitive control and its role in aberrant salience processing. First, we provide an overview of the triple network involving the salience, frontoparietal, and default mode networks and highlight the central role of the insula-anchored salience network in the aberrant mapping of salient external and internal events in schizophrenia...

Cognitive impairment is one of the core clinical symptom domains of schizophrenia. Research shows that cognitive deficits in this neuropsychiatric syndrome is associated with neurodevelopmental pathology affecting multiple brain regions such as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the hippocampus and the parietal lobe. The insula is a relatively small structure that is highly connected with several brain regions as well as multiple brain networks. A large number of studies have reported the involvement of the insula in many of the psychotic and nonpsychotic manifestations of schizophrenia...

BACKGROUND: Neurological soft signs (NSS) are often reported in patients with schizophrenia and may vary with psychopathological symptoms during the course of disease. Many cross-sectional neuroimaging studies have shown that NSS are associated with disturbed network connectivity in schizophrenia. However, it remains unclear how these associations change over time during the course of disorder. METHODS: In present study, 20 patients with first-episode schizophrenia and 20 controls underwent baseline structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scan and at one-year follow-up...