Widespread asymmetries of amygdala nuclei predict auditory verbal hallucinations in schizophrenia.

Background: Auditory verbal hallucinations, which frequently involve negative emotions, are reliable symptoms of schizophrenia. Brain asymmetries have also been linked to the condition, but the relevance of asymmetries within the amygdala, which coordinates all emotional signals, to the content of and response to auditory verbal hallucinations has not been explored.

Methods: We evaluated the performance of two asymmetry biomarkers that were recently introduced in literature: the distance index, which captures global asymmetries, and a revised version of the laterality index, which captures left-right local asymmetries.

When fMRI came to Bergen and Norway - as I remember it.

In this personal recollection, I review the beginning of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) research in Norway, i.e., at the University of Bergen and the Haukeland University Hospital in Bergen.

NMDAR dysfunction and the regulation of dopaminergic transmission in schizophrenia.

A substantial body of evidence implicates dysfunction in N-methyl-d-aspartate receptors (NMDARs) in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. This article illustrates how NMDAR dysfunction may give rise to many of the neurobiological phenomena frequently associated with schizophrenia with a particular focus on how NMDAR dysfunction affects the thalamic reticular nucleus (nRT) and pedunculopontine tegmental nucleus (PPTg). Furthermore, this article presents a model for schizophrenia illustrating how dysfunction in the nRT may interrupt prefrontal regulation of midbrain dopaminergic neurons, and how dysfunction in the PPTg may drive increased, irregular burst firing.

Linewidth-related bias in modelled concentration estimates from GABA-edited H-MRS.

J-difference-edited MRS is widely used to study GABA in the human brain. Editing for low-concentration target molecules (such as GABA) typically exhibits lower signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) than conventional non-edited MRS, varying with acquisition region, volume and duration. Moreover, spectral lineshape may be influenced by age-, pathology-, or brain-region-specific effects of metabolite T, or by task-related blood-oxygen level dependent (BOLD) changes in functional MRS contexts.

fMRI fluctuations within the language network are correlated with severity of hallucinatory symptoms in schizophrenia.

Although schizophrenia (SZ) represents a complex multiform psychiatric disorder, one of its most striking symptoms are auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH). While the neurophysiological origin of this pervasive symptom has been extensively studied, there is so far no consensus conclusion on the neural correlates of the vulnerability to hallucinate. With a network-based fMRI approach, following the hypothesis of altered hemispheric dominance (Crow, 1997), we expected that LN alterations might result in self-other distinction impairments in SZ patients, and lead to the distressing subjective experiences of hearing voices.