Losing the chain of thought: A meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies using verbal tasks in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: Disorganization symptoms are a main feature of schizophrenia, which include illogical and incoherent thinking, circumstantiality, tangentiality and loose associations. As these symptoms entail language deficits, several functional neuroimaging studies have been performed in schizophrenia using verbal tasks, producing somewhat heterogenous results. Hence, we performed a meta-analysis seeking to identify the most reliable neural alterations observed in schizophrenia patients during such tasks. METHODS: Web of Sciences, PubMed, and EMBASE were searched for functional neuroimaging studies during verbal tasks (e.g. verbal fluency and semantic processing) in schizophrenia. Out of 795 screened articles, 33 were eligible for this meta-analysis. A coordinated-based meta-analysis was performed with the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) approach, using the cluster-level family-wise error (FWE) correction set at p < 0.05. RESULTS: In schizophrenia, hyperactivations were observed in the left inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) and middle frontal gyrus (MFG) and hypoactivations were observed in the right IFG, the precentral gyrus and the left caudate nucleus. Another analysis pooling hyper- and hypoactivations revealed altered activations, firstly, in the left IFG and MFG, secondly, in the left precentral gyrus, IFG and insula, and, thirdly, in the left angular gyrus and precuneus. In the light of these results, not only classic language-related regions are abnormally activated during verbal tasks in schizophrenia, but also brain regions involved in executive functions, autobiographical memory and, unexpectedly, in motor functions. Further functional neuroimaging studies are needed to investigate the role of the striatum in linguistic sequencing in schizophrenia.

Regional cerebral blood flow at rest in schizophrenia and major depressive disorder: A functional neuroimaging meta-analysis.

Severe mental disorders (SMDs) such as schizophrenia (SCZ), major depressive disorder (MDD) and bipolar disorder (BD) are associated with altered brain function. Neuroimaging studies have illustrated spontaneous activity alterations across SMDs, but no meta-analysis has directly compared resting-state regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with one another. We conducted a meta-analysis of PET, SPECT and ASL neuroimaging studies to identify specific alterations of rCBF at rest in SMDs. Included are 20 studies in MDD, and 18 studies in SCZ. Due to the insufficient number of studies in BD, this disorder was left out of the analyses. Compared to controls, the SCZ group displayed reduced rCBF in the triangular part of the left inferior frontal gyrus and in the medial orbital part of the bilateral superior frontal gyrus. After correction, only a small cluster in the right inferior frontal gyrus exhibited reduced rCBF in MDD, compared to controls. Differences were found in these brain regions between SCZ and MDD. SCZ displayed reduced rCBF at rest in regions associated with default-mode, reward processing and language processing. MDD was associated with reduced rCBF in a cluster involved in response inhibition. Our meta-analysis highlights differences in the resting-state rCBF alterations between SCZ and MDD.