MedWire News: Analysing specific brain activity patterns may help predict the type of schizophrenia symptoms experienced by patients during an episode of psychosis, say UK researchers.
“The symptoms of major psychotic illness are diverse and vary widely across individuals,” explain Dr Paul Fletcher, from University of Cambridge, and colleagues.
For example, some patients predominantly suffer from bizarre and unpleasant perceptions, some are haunted by beliefs of persecution and others mainly experience problems ordering their thoughts and motivating themselves.
The ability to predict the nature of such symptoms in people with schizophrenia or other types of psychosis would help to personalise and improve the effectiveness of treatment for such patients, say the researchers.
Dr Fletcher and team studied 15 volunteers without a history of mental health disorders.
The participants were asked to take a drug called ketamine, which causes schizophrenia-like symptoms, or a dummy medication before performing a variety of tasks. One month later, patients who initially took ketamine were asked to take the dummy medication, and vice versa, while performing the same tasks.
The team found that the participants’ brain activity patterns on some tasks while taking the dummy medication predicted how they performed on the tasks after taking ketamine.
For example, participants taking the dummy medication who showed high levels of frontal and temporal brain activity while imagining the sounds of voices were more likely to experience strange perceptions on ketamine than those with lower levels of activity in these brain regions.
Other participants who showed high levels of activity in these brain regions while trying to complete simple sentences were more likely to have disordered thoughts when exposed to ketamine than those with lower levels of activity in these brain regions when performing this task.
"Our findings may provide a vulnerability marker to predict psychotic symptoms induced by drugs or disease," said Dr Fletcher. "This perhaps raises the prospect of early intervention strategies targeted toward schizophrenia patients' individual patterns of symptom vulnerability.”
Commenting on the study, psychiatrist Graham Williams, from Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, USA, who was not involved in the research, said: "These researchers have certainly taken a great step forward for our understanding of schizophrenia.
"At last, we have a tangible, biological approach to unravelling the complex and mystifying symptoms displayed by patients with schizophrenia."
The research is published in the Journal of Neuroscience.