Diminishing striatal activation across adolescent development during reward anticipation in offspring of schizophrenia patients

Changes in White Matter Organization in Adolescent Offspring of Schizophrenia Patients

“…We did not observe such an increase in FA for schizophrenia offspring and this may suggest stagnated white matter fiber maturation during adolescence, possibly as a result of genetic vulnerability for schizophrenia. This finding may be in line with the observation that ventral striatum function did not increase in schizophrenia offspring, whereas it did in control adolescents (Vink et al, 2016b).…”

“…Moreover, these regions are key components of the reward network (McClure et al, 2004;Sesack and Grace, 2010). We and other have reported on changes in frontostriatal reward processing in schizophrenia patients (Morris et al, 2012;Nielsen et al, 2012), siblings (Grimm et al, 2014;de Leeuw et al, 2015b), and offspring (Vink et al, 2016b).…”

“…We recently reported on diminishing striatal activation across adolescent development during reward anticipation in adolescent offspring of schizophrenia patients using functional MRI (Vink et al, 2016b). This result suggests that genetic vulnerability for schizophrenia (negatively) impacts frontostriatal network function during adolescence.…”

Increased responses of the reward circuitry to positive task feedback following acute stress in healthy controls but not in siblings of schizophrenia patients

“…Therefore, in this study we investigated the effects of stress on reward processing in unaffected siblings of schizophrenia patients who do not take any antipsychotics but who are at risk for multiple psychiatric disorders including schizophrenia, bipolar disorder and major depressive disorder (Cheng et al, 2017). Siblings and offspring of schizophrenia patients share on average 50% of the genetic material with the affected patient and exhibit increased baseline dopamine synthesis capacity and transmission (Huttunen et al, 2008;Brunelin et al, 2010) and altered ventral striatum and OFC responses during reward processing in the absence of stress (de Leeuw, Kahn and Vink, 2014;Vink et al, 2015). These findings suggest that the recovery of stress-induced changes in reward processing could be dysfunctional in this at-risk group.…”

The Salience of Reward

“…7 Neuroimaging in patients with a psychotic disorder has consistently revealed significantly attenuated activity in the ventral striatum during reward anticipation, as confirmed by a recent meta-analysis 5 that included 23 functional MRI studies. This pattern of reduced striatal activity during reward anticipation has also been found in unaffected siblings 8 and offspring 9 of patients with a psychotic disorder, which suggests that genetic risk of psychosis contributes to the response to rewarding cues. Recently, the ability to stratify individuals on the basis of polygenic RPSs for psychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, has offered new opportunities for clinical and epidemiologic research.…”