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This is the Medscape Neurology Minute. I am Dr. Alan Jacobs. Researchers from the Department of Psychology at Vanderbilt University have published a case-control study exploring the possibility that thalamocortical networks in the brain are differentially affected in schizophrenia. The investigators examined functional connectivity and intrinsic low-frequency blood oxygen level-dependent (BOLD) signal fluctuations between major divisions of the cortex and thalamus using resting-state functional MRI in 77 healthy patients and 62 patients with schizophrenia. The mean BOLD time series were extracted for 6 regions of the cerebral cortex and entered into a seed-based functional conductivity analysis. As expected, activity in the distinct cortical areas correlated with specific, largely nonoverlapping regions of the thalamus in both groups. Direct comparison between both groups revealed reduced prefrontal-thalamic conductivity and increased motor/somatosensory-thalamic connectivity in schizophrenia. Changes in connectivity were unrelated to local gray matter content within the thalamus and to antipsychotic medication dosage. No differences were observed in the temporal, posterior parietal, or occipital cortex conductivity with the thalamus. The investigators concluded that their findings established differential abnormalities of thalamocortical networks in schizophrenia that probably occurred during brain maturation. This study was selected from Medscape's Practice-Changing Articles in Neurology.
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