Auditory Oddball fMRI in Schizophrenia: Association of Negative Symptoms with Regional Hypoactivation to Novel Distractors.

Schizophrenia is associated with abnormal processing of salient stimuli, which may contribute to clinical symptoms. We used fMRI and a standard auditory 3-stimulus task to examine attention processing. Target stimuli and novel distractors were presented to 17 patients and 21 healthy controls and activation was correlated with negative and positive symptoms.

Acute effect of methadone maintenance dose on brain FMRI response to heroin-related cues.

Objective: Environmental drug-related cues have been implicated as a cause of illicit heroin use during methadone maintenance treatment of heroin dependence. The authors sought to identify the functional neuroanatomy of the brain response to visual heroin-related stimuli in methadone maintenance patients.

Method: Event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to compare brain responses to heroin-related stimuli and matched neutral stimuli in 25 patients in methadone maintenance treatment.

Visual attention circuitry in schizophrenia investigated with oddball event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging.

Objective: Schizophrenia patients have problems directing attention. Sustained attention requires ensuring that brain resources are focused on a selected target (top-down task) while ignoring irrelevant distractors (bottom-up interference). Whether patients have too little ability to focus or too much interference from distraction has not been clarified.