A voxel-based diffusion tensor imaging study of first-episode medication-free patients with schizophrenia / 中华神经医学杂志

ABSTRACT

Objective To explore the changes of white matter integrity in first-episode medication-flee patients with schizophrenia. Methods Diffusion tensor images (DTI) of whole brains of 40 first-episode medication-flee patients with schizophrenia and 68 healthy controls were acquired with a single-shot echo planar imaging (EPI) sequence aligned to the straight axial plane. Two-sample t-test by with voxel-based analysis in SPM5 software was performed on the fractional anisotropy (FA)images of the 2 groups after being preprocessed with DTI-studio and SPM5 software.Results Subjects of schizophrenia showed reduced white matter FA in these regions: the right amygdale (MNI:24, 2, -14; cluster=347 voxels), bilateral anterior cingulate (MNI: 6, 42, 2; cluster=586 voxels), right orbitofrontal (MNI: 20, 18, -10; cluster=166 voxels) as compared with healthy controls. Conclusion Abnormal white matter in the corticolimbic system circuit exists in patients with schizophrenia, which maybe involve in the neural mechanism of schizophrenia.