Brain metabolism during hallucination-like auditory stimulation in schizophrenia.

Bibliographic Details
Title: Brain metabolism during hallucination-like auditory stimulation in schizophrenia.
Authors: Guillermo Horga, Emilio Fernández-Egea, Anna Mané, Mireia Font, Kelly C Schatz, Carles Falcon, Francisco Lomeña, Miguel Bernardo, Eduard Parellada
Source: PLoS ONE, Vol 9, Iss 1, p e84987 (2014)
Publisher Information: Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2014.
Publication Year: 2014
Collection: LCC:Medicine
LCC:Science
Subject Terms: Medicine, Science
More Details: Auditory verbal hallucinations (AVH) in schizophrenia are typically characterized by rich emotional content. Despite the prominent role of emotion in regulating normal perception, the neural interface between emotion-processing regions such as the amygdala and auditory regions involved in perception remains relatively unexplored in AVH. Here, we studied brain metabolism using FDG-PET in 9 remitted patients with schizophrenia that previously reported severe AVH during an acute psychotic episode and 8 matched healthy controls. Participants were scanned twice: (1) at rest and (2) during the perception of aversive auditory stimuli mimicking the content of AVH. Compared to controls, remitted patients showed an exaggerated response to the AVH-like stimuli in limbic and paralimbic regions, including the left amygdala. Furthermore, patients displayed abnormally strong connections between the amygdala and auditory regions of the cortex and thalamus, along with abnormally weak connections between the amygdala and medial prefrontal cortex. These results suggest that abnormal modulation of the auditory cortex by limbic-thalamic structures might be involved in the pathophysiology of AVH and may potentially account for the emotional features that characterize hallucinatory percepts in schizophrenia.
Document Type: article
File Description: electronic resource
Language: English
ISSN: 1932-6203
Relation: http://europepmc.org/articles/PMC3885666?pdf=render; https://doaj.org/toc/1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0084987
Access URL: https://doaj.org/article/b72e5515fda2417b816b23dce80f2944
Accession Number: edsdoj.b72e5515fda2417b816b23dce80f2944
Database: Directory of Open Access Journals
More Details
ISSN:19326203
DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0084987
Published in:PLoS ONE
Language:English