Functional Resting-State Associations with Individual Schizophrenia-Like Symptoms (2024)

Undergraduate: Camila Vallebona

Faculty Advisor: Aysenil Belger
Department: Psychology and Neuroscience

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Introduction: Robust evidence suggests that schizophrenia spectrum disorders present altered functional connectivity in resting-state networks. While several studies have focused on total positive, total negative, and total disorganized symptoms scores in individuals with schizophrenia compared to controls, few studies evaluated the resting-state functional connectivity associations with total and individual symptom scores in nonclinical individuals with subsyndromal psychosis-like experiences._x000D_
Method: A hundred and twenty-two participants were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging at rest and assessed with the Scale for the Assessment of Prodromal Symptoms (SOPS). Twelve regions of interest (ROI) were selected based on previous literature to perform an ROI-to-ROI connectivity analysis in CONN Toolbox, giving an r-to-z transformed value for each of the 66 resting-state connections. Lasso regularization followed by logistic regression selected the connections that were associated with each symptom group prevalent in our sample._x000D_
Results: Total positive symptoms, total negative symptoms, total disorganized symptoms, perceptual abnormalities, avolition, attention deficits, and dysphoric mood were associated with 8 distinct resting-state connections, involving regions in the default-mode network, the salience network, the language network, and the hippocampus._x000D_
Conclusion: Our results suggest that deficits in interhemispheric connectivity and general functional dysconnectivity are present at subsyndromal levels of the disease. Transdiagnostic analyses of symptom subdomains of schizophrenia spectrum disorders should be analyzed systematically to identify symptom-specific therapeutic targets.