Iwabuchi, SJ., Liddle, PF. & Palaniyappan, L. Structural connectivity of the salience-executive loop in schizophrenia
Some regions of the brain specialise in allocating importance to various stimuli that require your attention. These regions form the so called salience processing brain system. Once a stimulus is selected, further processing is controlled by other 'executive' regions. Previously, our group demonstrated a failure of information flow between a key salience processing region (right anterior insula) and the cardinal executive region (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) in patients with schizophrenia.
We extended these findings by investigating a measure of white matter 'structural' connectivity of the pathway from insula to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We used a technique called tractography to study this pathway and its relationship with the disrupted information flow (indexed by fMRI-based effective connectivity metrics).
We showed that patients had a more pronounced integrity of the connections between insula with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This increase in structural connection was more pronounced in patients showing reduced information flow. This may be due to either compensatory changes in white matter, or a primary abnormality in structural integrity of this pathway resulting from deficient axonal pruning.
Some regions of the brain specialise in allocating importance to various stimuli that require your attention. These regions form the so called salience processing brain system. Once a stimulus is selected, further processing is controlled by other 'executive' regions. Previously, our group demonstrated a failure of information flow between a key salience processing region (right anterior insula) and the cardinal executive region (the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) in patients with schizophrenia.
We extended these findings by investigating a measure of white matter 'structural' connectivity of the pathway from insula to dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. We used a technique called tractography to study this pathway and its relationship with the disrupted information flow (indexed by fMRI-based effective connectivity metrics).
We showed that patients had a more pronounced integrity of the connections between insula with the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. This increase in structural connection was more pronounced in patients showing reduced information flow. This may be due to either compensatory changes in white matter, or a primary abnormality in structural integrity of this pathway resulting from deficient axonal pruning.
- First study to consider the white matter tract between anterior insula and frontal cortex in schizophrenia.
- First study investigating the relationship between effective and structural connectivity of a predefined tract in schizophrenia
- Published in The European Archives of Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences (IF:3.4)