Sat. Oct 12, 2019 8:40 AM - 10:20 AM Room 16 (Heian)

Organizer / Chair: Jinsong TANG (Department of Psychiatry, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, China), Co-chair: Hiroaki TOMITA (Department of Psychiatry, Graduate School of Medicine, Tohoku University, Japan), Discussants: ‌Lulin DAI (Department of Information Science and Biomedical Engineering of Kagoshima University, Japan), Yanhui LIAO (Mental Health Institute, The Second Xiangya Hospital of Central South University, China)

Schizophrenia is a severe, highly heritable, neuropsychiatric disorder. Previous studies on the relationship between interindividual variations in impulsivity and those in local brain structure in healthy subjects have yielded inconsistent findings. Our study aimed to clarify this issue using high-quality structural magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data from 1105 healthy young adults to calculate gray matter volume (GMV). Delay discounting was used to assess impulsivity. We found significant positive correlations between area-under-the-curve (AUC) measures of delay discounting and GMV in the bilateral temporal pole, i.e., individuals with smaller GMV in the temporal pole exhibited greater delay discounting (greater impulsivity), which suggest that interindividual differences in impulsivity are associated with temporal pole morphology. These findings may provide insight into the mechanisms of impulsive behavior in clinical populations.
In addition to impulsivity, schizophrenia patients often experience auditory verbal hallucination (AVHs) and most of the AVHs usually associate with the negative evaluation of patients. AVHs can also be found in other subjects, from healthy individual to various psychiatric disorders (such as bipolar disorder, major depression disorder, post traumatic stress disorder etc). The commonality and specificity of AVHs among different subjects (including healthy individuals and patients with various mental disorders) diseases have not yet been fully described. These problems affecting the early precise diagnosis and treatment for this disease AVHs in different subjects. We suggest that using machine learning combined with neuro-imaging -genetics will be used to explore the commonality and specificity of neuro-imaging -genetics features in AVHs among patients subjects with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, other disorders and healthy individuals with non-mental verbal hallucination. Understanding these features may reveal precise therapeutic targets, establish create the early diagnosis and precisely treatment predictive models for AVHs, establish objective index system for evaluating therapeutic outcomes, improve the early efficacy of diagnosis and treatment outcome of AVHs subjects, and to reduce the harmfulness of AVHs.
For the majority of schizophrenia patients, especially with AVHs, symptoms are treated with antipsychotic drugs such as risperidone, which has neurotransmitter receptor affinities of dopamine, serotonin and other transmitters and effective in treatment of acute psychosis and relapse prevention schizophrenia. There is a need to identify biomarkers for predicting, tracking and understanding psychopharmacological treatment outcomes. DNA methylation has been studied as a biomarker in schizophrenia risk. However, effects of antipsychotic medications on methylation have not been systematically examined. To estimate the effect of risperidone on DNA methylation, and investigate the relationship between DNA methylation changes and therapeutic effects on behavioral and neuroimaging phenotypes, this study conducted a longitudinal analysis of blood DNA methylation with 38 first-episode drug-naïve schizophrenia patients (FESPs) studied before and after risperidone monotherapy, and 38 demographically-matched healthy control individuals. We identified 8,204 FESPs associated CpG sites which enriched in brain related pathways. Risperidone treatment lead to methylation alterations of 6,143 CpG sites which are related to the calcium signaling pathway. Treatment normalized 659 CpG sites and these DNA methylation changes were related to alterations in symptoms severity, spontaneous brain physiological activity and cognitive function in FESPs.