A Selective Review of Volumetric and Morphometric Imaging in Schizophrenia

Animal Models of Deficient Sensorimotor Gating in Schizophrenia: Are They Still Relevant?

“…As noted below, published reports now catalog over twenty different brain regions with identifiable abnormalities in different cohorts of schizophrenia patients (cf. Levitt et al 2010). Furthermore, current estimates suggest that over 100 loci explain 7 % of the risk for the development of schizophrenia (e.g., Schizophrenia Working Group of the Psychiatric Genomics Consortium 2014; Stefansson et al 2014), and it is likely that only after we identify gene × gene and gene × environment interactions among these many risk variants will we ever account for a significant amount of the variance in the expression of the schizophrenia phenotype.…”

“…But it is not just the PFC: As noted above, the preponderance of findings in different schizophrenia cohorts support significant volumetric and/or morphometric abnormalities in over 20 brain regions (cf. Levitt et al 2010). Calculate the permutations of synaptic interactions in the simplest cartoon schematic, the number of different risk genes, and the epigenetic events, and multiply by orders of magnitude, and one can easily appreciate the futility of expecting even the smartest drugs to "fix what's broken."…”

Patterns of Brain Structural Changes in First-Contact, Antipsychotic Drug-Naïve Patients with Schizophrenia

“…Structural MR imaging studies have shown that reductions of GM volume occur in the brain of patients with schizophrenia compared with healthy control participants, though increased GM volumes of some subcortical regions have also been reported. 2 DTI studies of schizophrenic patients have disclosed an abnormal organization and integrity of several WM tracts of the brain. However, results are conflicting regarding which tracts are affected, with some DTI studies showing a marked involvement of the anterior pattern of brain WM regions in patients with schizophrenia, and others describing a posterior pattern of WM changes or even no difference compared with control participants.…”

190. Social Cognition in Early Schizophrenia: Exploratory Factor Analysis and Subcortical Biomarkers

“…In schizophrenia, structural abnormalities of both the amygdala and hippocampus have been found (Lawrie & Abukmeil, 1998;Levitt, Bobrow, Lucia, & Srinivasan, 2010;Shepherd, Laurens, Matheson, Carr, & Green, 2012), but the findings were variable (Shepherd et al, 2012). Specifically, structural MRI documented a reduction in hippocampal size in schizophrenia (Lawrie & Abukmeil, 1998).…”