The study of brain gyrification may provide useful information on the cytoarchitecture and connectivity of the brain. One of the methods that have been developed to estimate brain gyrification, known as surface ratio (SR), has not yet been studied in schizophrenia. Here we aimed to assess whether SR could provide new insights on the brain structure of schizophrenia patients and the severity of symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFProgression to psychosis has been associated with increased cortical thinning in the frontal, temporal and parietal lobes in individuals at clinical high risk for the disorder (CHR-P). The timing and spatial extent of these changes are thought to be influenced by age. However, most evidence so far stems from adult samples.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Massive infarction in adults is a devastating entity characterized by signs of extreme swelling of the brain's parenchyma. We explored whether a similar entity exists in neonates, which we call massive neonatal arterial ischemic stroke (M-NAIS), and assess its potential clinical implications.
Methods: Prospective multicenter cohort study comprising 48 neonates with gestational age ≥35 weeks with middle cerebral artery (MCA) NAIS was performed.
Verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia patients might be seen as internal verbal productions mistaken for perceptions as a result of over-salient inner speech and/or defective self-monitoring processes. Similar cognitive mechanisms might underpin verbal hallucination proneness in the general population. We investigated, in a non-clinical sample, the cerebral activity associated with verbal hallucinatory predisposition during false recognition of familiar words -assumed to stem from poor monitoring of inner speech-vs.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Despite the numerous studies in favor of breastfeeding for its benefits in cognition and mental health, the long-term effects of breastfeeding on brain structure are still largely unknown. Our main objective was to study the relationship between breastfeeding duration and cerebral gray matter volumes. We also explored the potential mediatory role of brain volumes on behavior.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Identifying biomarkers of transition to psychosis in individuals at clinical high risk for psychosis (CHR-P) is essential to understanding the mechanisms underlying the disease. Although cross-sectional abnormalities in cortical surface area (CSA) have been demonstrated in individuals at CHR-P who transition to psychosis (CHR-P-T) compared with those who do not (CHR-P-NT), how CSA longitudinally develops remains unclear, especially in younger individuals. We set out to compare CSA in adolescents at CHR-P and healthy controls (HC) over 2 points in time.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPurpose: Inborn errors of neurotransmitters are rare monogenic diseases. In general, conventional neuroimaging is not useful for diagnosis. Nevertheless, advanced neuroimaging techniques could provide novel diagnosis and prognosis biomarkers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Depressive symptoms are known to affect memory efficiency in various populations. More specifically, several studies conducted in patients suffering from schizophrenia have indicated that memory efficiency is affected by depressed mood in female patients and by anxiety in male patients. We investigated, using neuroimaging techniques, whether similar gender-specific associations with subclinical depression and anxiety could be observed in a non-clinical sample.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed
January 2022
Objective: In contrast to motor impairments, the association between lesion location and cognitive or language deficits in patients with neonatal arterial ischaemic stroke remains largely unknown. We conducted a voxel-based lesion-symptom mapping cross-sectional study aiming to reveal neonatal arterial stroke location correlates of language, motor and cognitive outcomes at 2 years of age.
Design: Prospective observational multicentre study.
Objective: The study of cortical gyrification in Alzheimer's disease (AD) could help to further understanding of the changes undergone in the brain during neurodegeneration. Here, we aimed to study brain gyrification differences between healthy controls (HC), mild cognitive impairment (MCI) patients, and AD patients, and explore how cerebral gyrification patterns were associated with memory and other cognitive functions.
Methods: We applied surface-based morphometry techniques in 2 large, independent cross-sectional samples, obtained from the Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative project.
Introduction: Context processing deficiencies have been established in patients with schizophrenia and it has been proposed that these deficiencies are involved in the formation of positive symptoms.
Method: We administered a temporal context discrimination task to 60 schizophrenia patients and 60 healthy individuals. Pictures were presented in two sessions separated by half an hour and the participants were required to remember afterwards whether the pictures had been presented in the first or the second session.
Fluctuating asymmetry represents the degree to which the right and left side of the body are asymmetrical, and is a sign of developmental instability. Higher levels of fluctuating asymmetry have been observed in individuals within the schizophrenia spectrum. We aimed to explore the associations of fluctuating asymmetry with psychotic and affective symptoms in schizophrenia patients, as well as with propensity to these symptoms in non-clinical individuals.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis study explored the brain structural correlates of psychological flexibility (PF) as measured with the Psychological Inflexibility in Pain Scale (PIPS) in patients with fibromyalgia (FM). Structural magnetic resonance imaging data from 47 FM patients were used to identify Gray Matter Volume (GMV) alterations related to PIPS scores. Brain GMV clusters related to PIPS were then correlated with clinical and cognitive variables to further explore how emerged brain clusters were intertwined with FM symptomatology.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: Data regarding neonatal arterial ischemic stroke (NAIS) topography are still sparse and inaccurate. Despite the importance of locating NAIS to predict the long-term outcome of neonates, a map of arterial territories is not yet available. Our aim was therefore to generate the first three-dimensional map of arterial territories of the neonatal brain (ATNB) and test its usefulness.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHallucinations have been found to be associated with various types of source memory failure in both schizophrenia patients and hallucination-prone healthy individuals. We investigated the associations of clinical and non-clinical hallucinations with source memory errors in a visual memory task that involved the remembering of picture presentation context. 59 schizophrenia patients and 61 healthy individuals took part in the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFArch Dis Child Fetal Neonatal Ed
March 2020
Objective: To correlate neuron-specific enolase (NSE) levels in cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) in neonate infants with symptomatic neonatal arterial ischaemic stroke (NAIS) with the arterial distribution of infarct, infarct volume and outcome.
Design: Prospective observational multicentre cohort.
Setting: Three paediatric university hospitals in Spain.
Pain
April 2019
Structural brain abnormalities, including decreased gray matter (GM) and white matter (WM) volume, have been observed in patients with schizophrenia. These decrements were found to be associated with positive and negative symptoms, but affective symptoms (depression and anxiety) were poorly explored. We hypothesized that abnormalities in GM and WM volume might also be related to affective symptoms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: The current study aimed at evaluating the reliability, convergent and divergent validity, and factor structure of the Spanish Launay-Slade Hallucinations Scale-Extended version (LSHS-E) in people with mental disorders and healthy controls.
Methods: Four hundred and twenty-two individuals completed the Spanish LSHS-E and the Spanish Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences. The convergent and divergent validity of the LSHS-E was assessed with the three dimensions of the Community Assessment of Psychic Experiences (positive, negative, and depressive dimensions) in healthy controls and people with a mental disorder.
Although there is recent evidence that cells from the peripheral immune system can gain access to the central nervous system in certain conditions such as multiple sclerosis, their role has not been assessed in psychosis. Here, we aimed to explore whether blood cell count was associated with brain volume and/or clinical symptomatology. A total of 218 participants (137 first-episode psychosis patients [FEP] and 81 healthy controls [HC]) were included in the study.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Higher levels of circulating oestrogens in women and testosterone in men have been shown to have a protective effect against the clinical manifestations of schizophrenia, mostly with respect to negative symptomatology. Certain studies suggest that they also have a protective effect against the neuropsychological impairment observed in the disease. We investigated whether greater prenatal exposure to estrogens in women and to testosterone in men, reflected by the 2D:4D ratio, was similarly associated with decreased negative symptomatology and improved neuropsychological functioning in patients.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Decreased processing speed in schizophrenia patients has been identified as a major impairment factor in various neuropsychological domains. Working memory span has been found to be involved in several deep or effortful cognitive processes. We investigated the impact that these 2 cognitive functions may have on phonological and semantic fluency in schizophrenia patients and healthy participants.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFResearch on sex-related brain asymmetries has not yielded consistent results. Despite its importance to further understanding of normal brain development and mental disorders, the field remains relatively unexplored. Here we employ a recently developed asymmetry measure, based on the Dice coefficient, to detect sex-related gray matter asymmetries in a sample of 457 healthy participants (266 men and 191 women) obtained from 5 independent databases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Previous research suggests that visual hallucinations in schizophrenia consist of mental images mistaken for percepts due to failure of the reality-monitoring processes. However, the neural substrates that underpin such dysfunction are currently unknown. We conducted a brain imaging study to investigate the role of visual mental imagery in visual hallucinations.
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