Elevated functional connectivity along a corticostriatal loop and the mechanism of auditory/verbal hallucinations in patients with schizophrenia.

By Ralph Hoffman, T. Fernandez, B. Pittman, Michelle Hampson. 2011

163 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Background Higher levels of inter-region functional coordination can facilitate emergence of neural activity as conscious percepts. We consequently tested the hypothesis that auditory/verbal hallucinations (AVHs) arise from elevated functional coordination within a speech processing network. Methods Functional coordination was indexed using functional connectivity (FC) computed from functional magnetic resonance imaging data. Thirty-two patients with schizophrenia reporting AVHs, 24 similarly diagnosed patients without hallucinations, and 23 healthy controls were studied. FC was seeded from a bilateral Wernicke’s region delineated according to activation detected during AVHs in a prior study. Results Wernicke’s-seeded FC with Brodmann Area 45/46 of the left IFG was significantly greater for hallucinating patients compared to nonhallucinating patients, but not compared to healthy controls. In contrast, Wernicke’s-seeded FC with a large subcortical region that included the thalamus, midbrain and putamen was significantly greater for the combined patient group compared with healthy controls after false discovery rate correction, but not when comparing the two patient groups. Within that subcortical domain, the putamen demonstrated significantly greater FC relative to a secondary left IFG seed region when hallucinators were compared to nonhallucinating patients. A follow-up analysis found that FC summed along a loop linking the Wernicke’s and IFG seed regions and the putamen was robustly greater for hallucinating patients compared to nonhallucinating patients and healthy controls. Conclusions These findings suggest that higher levels of functional coordination intrinsic to a corticostriatal loop comprise a causal factor leading to AVHs in schizophrenia.

Subfields: Cognitive Neuroscience, Psychiatry and Mental health, Radiology, Nuclear Medicine and Imaging

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Citations in the corpus

Neuroimaging auditory hallucinations in schizophrenia: from neuroanatomy to neurochemistry and beyond. (2012, background): “One FC study that directly compared patients with and without AH reports greater connectivity between Wernicke’s and IFG seed regions and the putamen in hallucinators.(36)”
Neurophysiological studies of auditory verbal hallucinations. (2012, background): “The lack of EEG theta band coherence (hypoconnectivity) between frontal and temporal lobes during talking has been associated with a tendency to hallucinate in patients with schizophrenia,(41) and fMRI hyperconnectivity within the corticostriatal loop has been implicated in the hallucination itself.”
Groupwise whole-brain parcellation from resting-state fMRI data for network node identification (2013, unknown): “Nodes have been defined using task-based fMRI studies (Arfanakis et al., 2000; Biswal et al., 1995; Cordes et al., 2000; Fair et al., 2007; Hoffman et al., 2011; Stevens et al., 2012) but these activate only a very limited fraction of the brain and thus this approach is not appropriate for…”
Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews Auditory Verbal Hallucinations as Atypical Inner Speech Monitoring, and the Potential of Neurostimulation as a Treatment Option (unknown): “Hoffman et al. (2011) have argued that a better model to explain AVHs involves the surfacing of 'unbidden thoughts' into consciousness , through a hyperconnected corticostriatal loop involving Wernicke's area and its right homologue, the left inferior frontal gyrus, and the putamen bilaterally.”