| Abstract No.: | C-C3077 |
| Country: | Canada |
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| Title: | DECREASED GREY MATTER DENSITY IN REGIONS INVOLVED IN EMOTIONAL PROCESSING IN WOMEN AND MEN WITH SCHIZOPHRENIA COMPARED TO MATCHED HEALTHY CONTROLS USING 3 TESLA MRI. |
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| Authors/Affiliations: | 2 Adham Mancini-Marïe*; 2 José Jimenez; 1 Cheryl Corcoran; 2 Emmanuel Stip; 2 Melissa Rinaldi; 2 Adrianna Mendrek;
1 Center of Prevention and Evaluation, New York State Psychiatric Institute, Columbia University, New York, NY; 2 Dept. of Psychiatry, Centre de Recherche Fernand Seguin, L-H Lafontaine Hopsital, University of Montreal, Montreal;
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| Content: | Introduction: There is evidence that schizophrenia affects the normal processing of emotions. Studies conducted by our group show that schizophrenia patients with negative symptoms had decreased activation in regions involved in emotional processing and increased activations in regions that inhibit emotional experience. To understand how gender may influence these findings we conducted another study comparing emotional processing in men and women with schizophrenia during passive viewing of emotional images and film clips. These studies showed that overall emotional stimuli evoked much more extensive and intense cerebral activations in men than in women with schizophrenia. The aim of the current study is to go a step further and investigate if structural differences in Grey Matter densities (GMd) between men and women with schizophrenia could explain difference in patterns of emotional processing.
Methods: 25 schizophrenia patients (15 men [SZ-M] and 10 women [SZ-W]) and 25 normal controls (15 men [NC-M] and 10 women [NC-W) signed an informed detailed consent prior to MRI scanning. High resolution T1-weighted-3D volume acquisition was acquired on a 3Tesla MRI Siemens TRIO system. VBM was performed using SPM5 toolbox. A study-specific template and a priori probability maps for gray matter, white matter and cerebral spinal fluid were constructed. VBM compares two tissue availability indices, concentration and volume, with the former comparing a proportion of a tissue type relative to other tissue types. A GM mask was created for 3 regions of interest that play a key role in emotional processing: bilateral inferior frontal cortex; orbitofrontal cortex, and anterior cingulate cortex using Mask for region of interest analyses software [MARINA]. Regions were identified using Automated Anatomical Labeling (AAL) within the SPM5 toolbox. GMd comparisons were performed using ANOVA random effects analysis, which estimates the error variance for each condition across the subjects. A probability threshold for multiple comparison corrected at p<0.001 and a z-score>4.00 were used for this a priori search.
Results: Compared to NC-W, SZ-W showed GMd decreases in left inferior, bilateral medial orbital, right inferior triangular, left inferior opercular, right olfactory, left middle and superior orbital, bilateral rectus, and right anterior cingulate (the affective division). SZ-M showed GMd decreases mainly in the right inferior opercular, left middle and superior orbital, right inferior orbital and right anterior cingulate (cognitive division) compared to NC-M. Increase in GMd was observed only in SZ-M in the inferior portion of orbital surface of the right inferior fontal.
Conclusions: Overall both patient groups showed GMd decreases compared to controls. However, women patients showed more extensive GMd decreases compared to men patients in both the inferior frontal gyrus which has a pivotal role in interoception of emotional stimuli and mirroring emotional experience in others and the affective part of anterior cingulate involved in the interoceptive and exteroceptive detection of emotional signals. These finding support previous studies by our group (Mendrek et al., 2007) and others (Gur et al., 2004) showing a disturbed cerebral sexual dimorphism in patients. |
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