Abstract
White matter tracts alterations have been reported in schizophrenia (SZ), but whether such abnormalities are associated with the effects of the disorder itself and/or genetic vulnerability remains unclear. Moreover, the specific patterns of different parts of these altered tracts have been less well studied. Thus, diffusion-weighted images were acquired from 38 healthy controls (HCs), 48 schizophrenia patients, and 33 unaffected first-degree relatives of SZs (FDRs). Diffusion properties of the 25 major tracts automatically extracted with probabilistic tractography were calculated and compared among groups. Regarding the peripheral regions of the tracts, significantly higher diffusivity values in the left superior longitudinal fasciculus (SLF) and the left anterior thalamic radiation (ATR) were observed in SZs than in HCs and unaffected FDRs. However, there were no significant differences between HCs and FDRs in these two tracts. While no main effects of group with respect to the core regions of the 25 tracts survived multiple comparisons correction, FDRs had significantly higher diffusivity values in the left medial lemniscus and lower diffusivity values in the middle cerebellar peduncle than HCs and SZs. These findings enhance the understanding of the abnormal patterns in the peripheral and core regions of the tracts in SZs and those at high genetic risk for schizophrenia. Our results suggest that alterations in the peripheral regions of the left SLF and ATR are features of established illness rather than genetic predisposition, which may serve as critical neural substrates for the psychopathology of schizophrenia.
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Data availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available on request from the corresponding author, Tianzi Jiang. The data are not publicly available due to ethical restrictions protecting patients’ privacy and consent.
Code availability
MRI data were preprocessed using the FMRIB Software Library (FSL) version 5.0, which is publicly available at https://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk. AutoPtx, used to run probabilistic tractography in subject-native space, is publicly available at https://fsl.fmrib.ox.ac.uk/fsl/fslwiki/AutoPtx. The custom code used to extract the core and peripheral regions of the tracts is available at the following url: https://github.com/Sangma/tract.git.
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We would like to thank all the participants who took part in this study.
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This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (Grant Number LQ19F030012), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Number 61901153), and the National Basic Research Program of China (973) (Grant Number 2011CB707800).
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Author contributions included conception and study design (SMX, JJZ, CYC, YC, LHL, and TZJ), data collection or acquisition (MS, YCC and HNW), statistical analysis (SMX and JJZ), interpretation of results (SMX, JJZ, YC, LHL, and TZJ), drafting the manuscript work or revising it critically for important intellectual content (SMX, JJZ, CYC, LHL, and TZJ) and approval of the final version to be published and agreement to be accountable for the integrity and accuracy of all aspects of the work (All authors).
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Xie, S., Zhuo, J., Song, M. et al. Tract-specific white matter microstructural alterations in subjects with schizophrenia and unaffected first-degree relatives. Brain Imaging and Behavior 16, 2110–2119 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00681-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11682-022-00681-2