Children at Risk for Schizophrenia Show Disordered Brain Networks

A team of neuroscientists led by a Wayne State University School of Medicine professor has discovered stark developmental differences in brain network function in children of parents with schizophrenia when compared to those with no family history of mental illness.

The study, led by Vaibhav Diwadkar, Ph.D., assistant professor of psychiatry and behavioral neurosciences and co-director of the Division of Brain Research and Imaging Neuroscience, was published in the March 2012 issue of the American Medical Association journal Archives of General Psychiatry and is titled, "Disordered Corticolimbic Interactions During Affective Processing in Children and Adolescents at Risk for Schizophrenia Revealed by Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging and Dynamic Causal Modeling."

The results provide significant insight into plausible origins of schizophrenia in terms of dysfunctional brain networks in adolescence, demonstrate sophisticated analyses of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data and clarify the understanding of developmental mechanisms in normal versus vulnerable brains. The resulting information can provide unique information to psychiatrists.

The study took place over three years, using MRI equipment at Harper University Hospital in Detroit. Using fMRI the researchers studied brain function in young individuals (8 to 20 years of age) as they observed pictures of human faces depicting positive, negative and neutral emotional expressions. Participants were recruited from the metropolitan Detroit area. Because children of patients are at highly increased risk for psychiatric illnesses such as schizophrenia, the team was interested in studying brain network function associated with emotional processing and the relevance of impaired network function as a potential predictor for schizophrenia.

To investigate brain networks, the researchers applied advanced analyses techniques to the fMRI data to investigate how brain regions dynamically communicate with each other. The study demonstrated that children at risk for the illness are characterized by reduced network communication and disordered network responses to emotional faces. This suggests that brain developmental processes are going awry in children whose parents have schizophrenia, suggesting this is a subgroup of interest to watch in future longitudinal studies.

Schizophrenia: Children at Risk

Age
Schizophrenia is rare in children under the age of 12, but affects about 1% of the population in the United States. About one million people are being treated for schizophrenia on an outpatient basis. Of those, 15% will kill themselves.

Gender
In childhood the gender distribution of schizophrenia is marginally weighted toward boys, but by adolescence the female/male ratio is just about even.

If a parent or sibling has schizophrenia, a youngster has a ten times greater chance of having schizophrenia than a person who does not have the disorder in the immediate family. In addition, there is a 50% concordance rate for identical twins compared to a 10% rate for fraternal twins. It is important to understand that a person would not be diagnosed with schizophrenia if the bizarre or unusual behavior was due to a physical illness or drug abuse.