Multimodal Magnetic Resonance Imaging Reveals Aberrant Brain Age Trajectory During Youth in Schizophrenia Patients

Abstract

Accelerated brain aging had been widely reported in patients with schizophrenia (SZ). However, brain aging trajectories in SZ patients have not been well-documented using three-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data. In this study, 138 schizophrenia patients and 205 normal controls aged 20–60 were included and multimodal MRI data were acquired for each individual, including structural MRI, resting state-functional MRI and diffusion tensor imaging. The brain age of each participant was estimated by features extracted from multimodal MRI data using linear multiple regression. The correlation between the brain age gap and chronological age in SZ patients was best fitted by a positive quadratic curve with a peak chronological age of 47.33 years. We used the peak to divide the subjects into a youth group and a middle age group. In the normal controls, brain age matched chronological age well for both the youth and middle age groups, but this was not the case for schizophrenia patients. More importantly, schizophrenia patients exhibited increased brain age in the youth group but not in the middle age group. In this study, we aimed to investigate brain aging trajectories in SZ patients using multimodal MRI data and revealed an aberrant brain age trajectory in young schizophrenia patients, providing new insights into the pathophysiological mechanisms of schizophrenia.

Predicting aging trajectories of decline in brain volume, cortical thickness and fractional anisotropy in schizophrenia

“…Chen et al also found that the normalized predicted age difference did not show a significant correlation with the duration of illness in schizophrenia 23 . We found that previous studies had inconsistent results on the association between the brain age gap and duration of illness in individuals with schizophrenia 14 , 17 , 21 , 22 . The relevant studies are still limited.…”

“…Koutsouleris et al found a linear increase in brain age gap from the at-risk, recent onset, and recurrent stages of individuals with schizophrenia 22 . Huang and colleagues indicated that the brain age gap of young individuals with schizophrenia was larger than that of healthy controls; however, the same result was not observed in middle-aged individuals with schizophrenia 21 . Demro et al demonstrated that the disease course of psychotic illness was not significantly correlated with their brain age gap 14 .…”

“…In addition, they noted that the brain age model constructed using FA displayed higher sensitivity than that of models based on other features, such as axial diffusivity, mean diffusivity, and radial diffusivity 19 . A few studies have combined multimodal MRI to estimate brain age in individuals with schizophrenia 20 , 21 . The results demonstrated that the brain age of individuals with schizophrenia was higher than their chronological age 20 , 21 .…”

“…A few studies have combined multimodal MRI to estimate brain age in individuals with schizophrenia 20 , 21 . The results demonstrated that the brain age of individuals with schizophrenia was higher than their chronological age 20 , 21 .…”

Investigating brain aging trajectory deviations in different brain regions of individuals with schizophrenia using multimodal magnetic resonance imaging and brain-age prediction: a multicenter study

“…Previous studies on brain-age prediction have also demonstrated that individuals with schizophrenia exhibit deviations in brain aging trajectories, as indicated in both T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) [16][17][18][19][20][21][22][23][24] and DTI [25,26] findings. The recent studies used multimodal MRI to evaluate the brain age gap in patients with schizophrenia and obtained results consistent with those of studies using a single neuroimaging modality [27][28][29][30].…”