Abnormal Rich-Club Organization Associated with Compromised Cognitive Function in Patients with Schizophrenia and Their Unaffected Parents
1Institute of Mental Health, Peking University Sixth Hospital, Beijing 100191, China
2National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders and Key Laboratory of Mental Health (Ministry of Health), Peking University, Beijing 100191, China
3Department of Psychiatry, Wuxi Mental Health Center, Nanjing Medical University, Wuxi 214151, China
4Wuxi Tongren International Rehabilitation Hospital, Wuxi 214151, China
5Peking University-Tsinghua University Joint Center for Life Sciences/ PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
Abstract
Schizophrenia is considered to be a disorder of brain connectivity, which might result from a disproportionally impaired rich-club organization. The rich-club is composed of highly interconnected hub regions that play crucial roles in integrating information between different brain regions. Few studies have yet investigated whether the structural rich-club organization is impaired in patients and their first-degree relatives. In this study, we established a weighted network model of white matter connections using diffusion tensor imaging of 19 patients and 39 unaffected parents, 22 young healthy controls for the patients, and 25 old healthy controls for the parents. Feeder edges between rich-club nodes and non-rich-club nodes were significantly decreased in both schizophrenic patients and their unaffected parents compared with controls. Furthermore, the feeder edges showed significant positive correlations with the scores in Category Fluency Test—animal naming in the unaffected parents. Specific feeder edges exhibited discriminative power with accuracy of 84.4% in distinguishing unaffected parents from old healthy controls. Our findings suggest that impaired rich-club organization, especially impaired feeder edges, may be related to familial vulnerability to schizophrenia, possibly reflecting a genetic predisposition for schizophrenia.
Keywords
Structural brain network,Diffusion tensor imaging,Rich-club,Familial vulnerability,Schizophrenia
