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Progressive reduction in cortical thickness as psychosis develops: a multisite longitudinal neuroimaging study of youth at elevated clinical risk.

ABSTRACT: Individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) who progress to fully psychotic symptoms have been observed to show a steeper rate of cortical gray matter reduction compared with individuals without symptomatic progression and with healthy control subjects. Whether such changes reflect processes associated with the pathophysiology of schizophrenia or exposure to antipsychotic drugs is unknown.In this multisite study, 274 CHR cases, including 35 individuals who converted to psychosis, and 135 healthy comparison subjects were scanned with magnetic resonance imaging at baseline, 12-month follow-up, or the point of conversion for the subjects who developed fully psychotic symptoms.In a traveling subjects substudy, excellent reliability was observed for measures of cortical thickness and subcortical volumes. Controlling for multiple comparisons throughout the brain, CHR subjects who converted to psychosis showed a steeper rate of gray matter loss in the right superior frontal, middle frontal, and medial orbitofrontal cortical regions as well as a greater rate of expansion of the third ventricle compared with CHR subjects who did not convert to psychosis and healthy control subjects. Differential tissue loss was present in subjects who had not received antipsychotic medications during the interscan interval and was predicted by baseline levels of an aggregate measure of proinflammatory cytokines in plasma.These findings demonstrate that the brain changes are not explained by exposure to antipsychotic drugs but likely play a role in psychosis pathophysiology. Given that the cortical changes were more pronounced in subjects with briefer durations of prodromal symptoms, contributing factors may predominantly play a role in acute-onset forms of psychosis.

SUBMITTER: Cannon TD

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4264996 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Progressive reduction in cortical thickness as psychosis develops: a multisite longitudinal neuroimaging study of youth at elevated clinical risk.

Cannon Tyrone D TD Chung Yoonho Y He George G Sun Daqiang D Jacobson Aron A van Erp Theo G M TG McEwen Sarah S Addington Jean J Bearden Carrie E CE Cadenhead Kristin K Cornblatt Barbara B Mathalon Daniel H DH McGlashan Thomas T Perkins Diana D Jeffries Clark C Seidman Larry J LJ Tsuang Ming M Walker Elaine E Woods Scott W SW Heinssen Robert R

Biological psychiatry 20140612 2

<h4>Background</h4>Individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) who progress to fully psychotic symptoms have been observed to show a steeper rate of cortical gray matter reduction compared with individuals without symptomatic progression and with healthy control subjects. Whether such changes reflect processes associated with the pathophysiology of schizophrenia or exposure to antipsychotic drugs is unknown.<h4>Methods</h4>In this multisite study, 274 CHR cases, including 35 individuals who converte ...[more]

PMID: 25034946

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Project description:The continuum view of the psychosis spectrum (PS) implies that, in population-based samples, PS symptoms should be associated with neural abnormalities similar to those found in help-seeking clinical risk individuals and in schizophrenia. To our knowledge, functional neuroimaging has not previously been applied in large population-based PS samples and can help us understand the neural architecture of psychosis more broadly and identify brain phenotypes beyond symptoms that are associated with the extended psychosis phenotype.To examine the categorical and dimensional relationships of PS symptoms to prefrontal hypoactivation during working memory and to amygdala hyperactivation during threat emotion processing.The Philadelphia Neurodevelopmental Cohort is a genotyped, prospectively accrued, population-based sample of almost 10,000 youths who received a structured psychiatric evaluation and a computerized neurocognitive battery. The study was conducted at an academic and children's hospital health care network, between November 1, 2009 to November 30, 2011. A subsample of 1445 youths underwent neuroimaging, including functional magnetic resonance imaging tasks examined herein. Participants were youth aged 11 to 22 years old identified through structured interview as having PS features (PS group) (n = 260) and typically developing (TD) comparison youth without significant psychopathology (TD group) (n = 220).Two functional magnetic resonance imaging paradigms were used: a fractal n-back working memory task probing executive system function and an emotion identification task probing amygdala responses to threatening faces.In the n-back task, working memory evoked lower activation in the PS group than the TD group throughout the executive control circuitry, including dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (cluster-corrected P <?.05). Within the PS group, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation correlated with cognitive deficits (r =?.32, P <?.001), but no correlation was found with positive symptom severity. During emotion identification, PS demonstrated elevated responses to threatening facial expressions in amygdala, as well as left fusiform cortex and right middle frontal gyrus (cluster-corrected P <?.05). The response in the amygdala correlated with positive symptom severity (r =?.16, P =?.01) but not with cognitive deficits.The pattern of functional abnormalities observed in the PS group is similar to that previously found in schizophrenia and help-seeking risk samples. Specific circuit dysfunction during cognitive and emotion-processing tasks is present early in the development of psychopathology and herein could not be attributed to chronic illness or medication confounds. Hypoactivation in executive circuitry and limbic hyperactivation to threat could reflect partly independent risk factors for PS symptoms, with the former relating to cognitive deficits that increase the risk for developing psychotic symptoms and the latter contributing directly to positive psychotic symptoms.

Dataset Information

Progressive reduction in cortical thickness as psychosis develops: a multisite longitudinal neuroimaging study of youth at elevated clinical risk.

Publications

Progressive reduction in cortical thickness as psychosis develops: a multisite longitudinal neuroimaging study of youth at elevated clinical risk.

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