Altered functional connectivity of prefrontal cortex in healthy elderly and Alzheimer's disease patient during a verbal fluency task: An fNIRS study

摘要

Network connectivity associated with delusion in patients with schizophrenia Schizophrenia is a severe mental disorder that manifests disor- ganized speech, poor social and cognitive functioning, abnormal thoughts and perceptions, hallucination and/or delusion. This multitude of symptoms has caused the problem of clinical het- erogeneity, and for decades, many attempts have been made to illuminate understanding of its major symptoms. However, our understanding of schizophrenia is still limited, and neural corre- lates of symptoms of schizophrenia have yet been discovered. Here, the authors investigated whether there are distinct network con- nectivity associated with delusion in patients with schizophrenia. A total of 75 subjects participated. Patients with high delusion (SCZ- D) were selected based on their scoring on ‘Delusions’ item on The Positive and Negative Syndrome Scale (PANSS). The authors used multivariate distance-based matrix regression (MDMR) to investi- gate the relationship between delusion and resting state functional connectivity (RSFC). Our hypothesis is that there will be distinct connectivity associated with delusion severity in schizophrenia. We believe the results will be able to offer novel perspective on subtyping schizophrenia, which will eventually provide meaning- ful insight to the literature in understanding and treatment of the illness.