Deviant spontaneous neural activity as a potential early-response predictor for therapeutic interventions in patients with schizophrenia

Huan Jing; Chunguo Zhang; Haohao Yan; Xiaoling Li; Jiaquan Liang; Wenting Liang; Yangpan Ou; Weibin Wu; Huagui Guo; Wen Deng; Guojun Xie; Wenbin Guo

doi:10.3389/fnins.2023.1243168

Deviant spontaneous neural activity as a potential early-response predictor for therapeutic interventions in patients with schizophrenia

Front Neurosci. 2023 Aug 31:17:1243168. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2023.1243168. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Affiliations

¹ Department of Psychiatry, The Third People's Hospital of Foshan, Foshan, Guangdong, China.
² Department of Psychiatry, National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders, and National Center for Mental Disorders, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, Changsha, Hunan, China.

Abstract

Objective: Previous studies have established significant differences in the neuroimaging characteristics between healthy controls (HCs) and patients with schizophrenia (SCZ). However, the relationship between homotopic connectivity and clinical features in patients with SCZ is not yet fully understood. Furthermore, there are currently no established neuroimaging biomarkers available for the diagnosis of SCZ or for predicting early treatment response. The aim of this study is to investigate the association between regional homogeneity and specific clinical features in SCZ patients.

Methods: We conducted a longitudinal investigation involving 56 patients with SCZ and 51 HCs. The SCZ patients underwent a 3-month antipsychotic treatment. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), regional homogeneity (ReHo), support vector machine (SVM), and support vector regression (SVR) were used for data acquisition and analysis.

Results: In comparison to HCs, individuals with SCZ demonstrated reduced ReHo values in the right postcentral/precentral gyrus, left postcentral/inferior parietal gyrus, left middle/inferior occipital gyrus, and right middle temporal/inferior occipital gyrus, and increased ReHo values in the right putamen. It is noteworthy that there was decreased ReHo values in the right inferior parietal gyrus after treatment compared to baseline data.

Conclusion: The observed decrease in ReHo values in the sensorimotor network and increase in ReHo values in the right putamen may represent distinctive neurobiological characteristics of patients with SCZ, as well as a potential neuroimaging biomarker for distinguishing between patients with SCZ and HCs. Furthermore, ReHo values in the sensorimotor network and right putamen may serve as predictive indicators for early treatment response in patients with SCZ.

Keywords: brain; magnetic resonance imaging; regional homogeneity; schizophrenia; support vector machine; support vector regression.