Hyper-Activated Brain Resting-State Network and Mismatch Negativity Deficit in Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucination Revealed by an Event-Related Potential Evidence

Qiaoling Sun; Yehua Fang; Xuemei Peng; Yongyan Shi; Jinhong Chen; Lifeng Wang; Liwen Tan

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00765

Hyper-Activated Brain Resting-State Network and Mismatch Negativity Deficit in Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucination Revealed by an Event-Related Potential Evidence

Front Psychiatry. 2020 Aug 3:11:765. doi: 10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00765. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Qiaoling Sun¹, Yehua Fang², Xuemei Peng³, Yongyan Shi¹, Jinhong Chen⁴, Lifeng Wang⁵, Liwen Tan¹

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry, Mental Health Institute of the Second Xiangya Hospital, Central South University, Changsha, China.
² Department of Clinical Psychology, Zhuzhou Central Hospital, Zhuzhou, China.
³ Department Psychology, Xiangtan Central Hospital, Xiangtan, China.
⁴ Department of Sleeping Disorders & Neurosis, Brain Hospital of Hunan Province, Changsha, China.
⁵ Department of Clinical Psychology, The Third Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, China.

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a holergasia with unclear mechanism and high heterogeneity. Auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) study might help in understanding schizophrenia from the perspective of individual symptoms. This study aimed to investigate the activities of the resting-state networks (RSN) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and mismatch negativity (MMN) in task-related state of schizophrenia patients with AVH. We recruited 30 schizophrenia patients without any medication for more than 4 weeks (15 AVH patients and 15 Non-AVH patients) and 15 healthy controls. We recorded the EEG data of the participants in the resting-state for 7 min and the event-related potential (ERP) data under an auditory oddball paradigm. In the resting-state EEG network, AVH patients exhibited a higher clustering coefficient than Non-AVH patients and healthy controls on delta and beta bands and a shorter characteristic path length than Non-AVH patients and healthy controls on all frequency bands. For ERP data, AVH patients showed a lower MMN amplitude than healthy controls (p = 0.017) and Non-AVH patients (p = 0.033). What's more, MMN amplitude was positively correlated with clustering coefficient, and negatively correlated with characteristic path length on delta, theta, beta and gamma band in AVH patients. Our results indicate that AVH patients showed a hyper-activity in resting-state and may have impaired higher-order auditory expectations in the task-related state than healthy controls and Non-AVH patients. And it seems reasonable to conclude that the formation of AVH may occupy certain brain resources and compete for brain resources with external auditory stimuli.

Keywords: auditory verbal hallucination (AVH); event-related potential; mismatch negativity (MMN); resting-state network (RSN); schizophrenia.