Thalamo-cortical functional connectivity in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

The thalamus is a highly connected subcortical structure that relays and integrates sensory and cortical information, which is critical for coherent and accurate perceptual awareness and cognition. Thalamic dysfunction is a classical finding in schizophrenia (SZ), and resting-state functional MRI has implicated somatomotor and frontal lobe thalamic dysconnectivity. However, it remains unclear whether these findings generalize to different psychotic disorders, are confined to specific thalamic sub-regions, and how they relate to structural thalamic alterations.

Consistent Functional Connectivity Alterations in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder: A Multisite Study.

Schizophrenia (SZ) is a severe mental illness with high heritability and complex etiology. Mounting evidence from neuroimaging has implicated disrupted brain network connectivity in the pathophysiology. However, previous findings are inconsistent, likely due to a combination of methodological and clinical variability and relatively small sample sizes.

Global brain connectivity alterations in patients with schizophrenia and bipolar spectrum disorders.

Background: The human brain is organized into functionally distinct modules of which interactions constitute the human functional connectome. Accumulating evidence has implicated perturbations in the patterns of brain connectivity across a range of neurologic and neuropsychiatric disorders, but little is known about diagnostic specificity. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorders are severe mental disorders with partly overlapping symptomatology.

Functional connectivity indicates differential roles for the intraparietal sulcus and the superior parietal lobule in multiple object tracking.

Attentive tracking requires sustained object-based attention, rather than passive vigilance or rapid attentional shifts to brief events. Several theories of tracking suggest a mechanism of indexing objects that allows for attentional resources to be directed toward the moving targets. Imaging studies have shown that cortical areas belonging to the dorsal frontoparietal attention network increase BOLD-signal during multiple object tracking (MOT).

Disintegration of Sensorimotor Brain Networks in Schizophrenia.

Background: Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder associated with derogated function across various domains, including perception, language, motor, emotional, and social behavior. Due to its complex symptomatology, schizophrenia is often regarded a disorder of cognitive processes. Yet due to the frequent involvement of sensory and perceptual symptoms, it has been hypothesized that functional disintegration between sensory and cognitive processes mediates the heterogeneous and comprehensive schizophrenia symptomatology.

CACNA1C risk variant and amygdala activity in bipolar disorder, schizophrenia and healthy controls.

Objectives: Several genetic studies have implicated the CACNA1C SNP rs1006737 in bipolar disorder (BD) and schizophrenia (SZ) pathology. This polymorphism was recently found associated with increased amygdala activity in healthy controls and patients with BD. We performed a functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) study in a sample of BD and SZ cases and healthy controls to test for altered amygdala activity in carriers of the rs1006737 risk allele (AA/AG), and to investigate if there were differences across the diagnostic groups.