Relationship between White Matter Alterations and Pathophysiological Symptoms in Patients with Ultra-High Risk of Psychosis, First-Episode, and Chronic Schizophrenia

Abstract

Some symptoms of schizophrenia might be present before full-blown psychosis, so white matter changes must be studied both in individuals with emerging psychosis and chronic schizophrenia. A total of 86 patients—12 ultra-high risk of psychosis (UHR), 20 first episode psychosis (FEP), 54 chronic schizophrenia (CS), and 33 healthy controls (HC)—underwent psychiatric examination and diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) in a 3-Tesla MRI scanner. We assessed fractional anisotropy (FA) and mean diffusivity (MD) of the superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and inferior longitudinal fasciculus (ILS). We found that CS patients had lower FA than FEP patients (p = 0.025) and HC (p = 0.088), and higher MD than HC (p = 0.037) in the right SLF. In the CS group, we found positive correlations of MD in both right ILF (rho = 0.39, p p p r = −0.74, p r = −0.77, p < 0.05). However promising, these findings should be treated as preliminary, and further research must verify whether they can be treated as potential biomarkers of psychosis.

Keywords

• ultra-high risk
• first episode psychosis
• schizophrenia
• diffusion tensor imaging (DTI)
• fractional anisotropy
• white matter