Abstract
Basal ganglia, which include the striatum and thalamus, have key roles in motivation, emotion, motor function, also contribute to higher-order cognitive function. Previous researches have documented structural and functional alterations in basal ganglia in schizophrenia. While few studies have assessed asymmetries of these characters in basal ganglia of schizophrenia. The current study investigated this issue by using diffusion tensor imaging, anatomic T1-weight image and resting-state functional data from 88 chronic schizophrenic subjects and 92 healthy controls. The structural characteristic, including fractional anisotropy, mean diffusivity (MD) and volume, were extracted and quantified from the subregions of basal ganglia, including caudate, putamen, pallidum and thalamus, through automated atlas-based method. The resting-state functional maps of these regions were also calculated through seed-based functional connectivity. Then, the laterality indexes of structural and functional features were calculated. Compared with healthy controls, schizophrenic subjects showed increased left laterality of volume in striatum and reduced left laterality of volume in thalamus. Furthermore, the difference of laterality of subregions in thalamus is compensatory in schizophrenic subjects. Importantly, the severity of patients’ positive symptom was negative corelated with reduced left laterality of volume in thalamus. Our findings provide preliminary evidence demonstrating that the possibility of aberrant laterality in neural pathways and connectivity patterns related to the basal ganglia in schizophrenia.
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Acknowledgements
This work was partly supported by the grant from the National Key R&D Program of China (No. 2018YFA0701400), the National Nature Science Foundation of China (grant number: 61933003, 81861128001, 81771822, 81771925), the ‘111’ project of China (grant number B12027) the CAMS Innovation Fund for Medical Sciences (CIFMS) (No. 2019-I2M-5-039) and Sichuan Province Science and Technology Support Project (No.2019YJ0651).
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HH, CL, MD and DY had made a substantial contribution to the conception and drafting and revising the article; NL, ZL, GY, HW and MH had made a substantial contribution to the analysis and interpretation of the data, and then they gave final approval of the version to be published.
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He, H., Luo, C., Li, N. et al. Altered asymmetries of diffusion and volumetry in basal ganglia of schizophrenia. Brain Imaging and Behavior 15, 782–787 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00286-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-020-00286-7