Near-Infrared Spectroscopy in Schizophrenia: A Possible Biomarker for Predicting Clinical Outcome and Treatment Response

Abstract

Functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) is a relatively new technique that can measure hemoglobin changes in brain tissues, and its use in psychiatry has been progressing rapidly. Although it has several disadvantages (e.g., relatively low spatial resolution and the possibility of shallow coverage in the depth of brain regions) compared with other functional neuroimaging techniques (e.g., functional magnetic resonance imaging and positron emission tomography), fNIRS may be a candidate instrument for clinical use in psychiatry, as it can measure brain activity in naturalistic position easily and non-invasively. fNIRS instruments are also small and work silently, and can be moved almost everywhere including schools and care units. Previous fNIRS studies have shown that patients with schizophrenia have impaired activity and characteristic waveform patterns in the prefrontal cortex during the letter version of the verbal fluency task, and part of these results have been approved as one of the Advanced Medical Technologies as an aid for the differential diagnosis of depressive symptoms by the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare of Japan in 2009, which was the first such approval in the field of psychiatry. Moreover, previous studies suggest that the activity in the frontopolar prefrontal cortex is associated with their functions in chronic schizophrenia and is its next candidate biomarker. Future studies aimed at exploring fNIRS differences in various clinical stages, longitudinal changes, drug effects, and variations during different task paradigms will be needed to develop more accurate biomarkers that can be used to aid differential diagnosis, the comprehension of the present condition, the prediction of outcome, and the decision regarding treatment options in schizophrenia. Future fNIRS researches will require standardized measurement procedures, probe settings, analytical methods and tools, manuscript description, and database systems in an fNIRS community.

Effect of metabotropic glutamate receptor-3 variants on prefrontal brain activity in schizophrenia: An imaging genetics study using multi-channel near-infrared spectroscopy

“…Second, although we have previously reported and reviewed other studies that have shown that medication has little influence on brain activity as measured by NIRS in larger sample sizes (Koike et al, 2013a), the present study showed a significant correlation between the NIRS signal and chlorpromazine equivalent dose. This correlation was found irrespective of the genotype; however, we conducted a confirmation analysis to exclude the potential effects of medication using ANCOVA, and we found no effect of medication on the results.…”

“…This correlation was found irrespective of the genotype; however, we conducted a confirmation analysis to exclude the potential effects of medication using ANCOVA, and we found no effect of medication on the results. Antipsychotics are not thought to act on glutamate receptors directly and there has been no study to find any effect of antipsychotics medication on brain activity measured by NIRS in patients with schizophrenia (Koike et al, 2013a), but potential gene × medication interactions should be considered (Bishop et al, 2005;Marumo et al, 2014).…”

Prefrontal modulation during chewing performance in occlusal dysesthesia patients: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study

“…Thus, prefrontal activity markers during chewing and somatic state examinations, such as SCL-90-R, may be useful in clinical settings to analyze the neuro-pathological background in patients complaining of persistent OD. This suggestion is in line with previous research results showing that fNIRS is a functional imaging method that relies on the principal of neurovascular couplings and applicable for evaluation of psychiatric state using prefrontal cortex blood flow in patients with psychiatric disorders [22,23,[58][59][60][61][62][63].…”

Dynamic changes in near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) findings in first-episode schizophrenia: a case report

“…Recent studies have shown that frontal hemodynamic patterns measured by NIRS can be a biomarker for the diagnosis of schizophrenia 1,2) . However, some researchers have stated that findings detected with NIRS may not be trait markers but state markers 3,4) . Therefore, in the present case, we measured NIRS a total of four times during the clinical course of the acute phase of a patient with first -episode schizophrenia.…”