MEG Functional Neuroimaging of Schizophrenic Patients and Comparison Subjects During Word Generation

Summary

To investigate the abnormal functional interaction between language areas and prefrontal cortex in schizophrenic patients with auditory hallucinations, locations of significant change of neural activities between word generation and rest conditions were estimated using magnetoencephalography (MEG). Using MEG, five right-handed patients with auditory hallucinations and six normal volunteers were submitted to a spatial filtering analysis. In the normal volunteers, bilateral language areas including both posterior inferior frontal gyrus and posterior superior temporal gyrus, bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and mid- to lower primary motor cortex showed significant changes. In four of the five schizophrenic patients, no language areas showed significant change in spite of the same performance level. These findings suggest the background hyperactivity of language areas in patients with auditory hallucinations that might be caused by the abnormal functional connectivity between language areas and prefrontal cortex.