Gamma-Aminobutyric Acid Concentration is Reduced in Visual Cortex in Schizophrenia and Correlates with Orientation-Specific Surround Suppression
By Jong H. Yoon, Richard J. Maddock, Ariel S. Rokem, M. Silver, Michael J. Minzenberg, John Daniel Ragland, Cameron S. Carter. 2010
388 citations recorded by the source corpus.
The neural mechanisms underlying cognitive deficits in schizophrenia remain essentially unknown. The GABA hypothesis proposes that reduced neuronal GABA concentration and neurotransmission results in cognitive impairments in schizophrenia. However, few in vivo studies have directly examined this hypothesis. We used magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) at high field to measure visual cortical GABA levels in 13 subjects with schizophrenia and 13 demographically matched healthy control subjects. We found that the schizophrenia group had an ∼10% reduction in GABA concentration. We further tested the GABA hypothesis by examining the relationship between visual cortical GABA levels and orientation-specific surround suppression (OSSS), a behavioral measure of visual inhibition thought to be dependent on GABAergic synaptic transmission. Previous work has shown that subjects with schizophrenia exhibit reduced OSSS of contrast discrimination (Yoon et al., 2009). For subjects with both MRS and OSSS data (n = 16), we found a highly significant positive correlation (r = 0.76) between these variables. GABA concentration was not correlated with overall contrast discrimination performance for stimuli without a surround (r = −0.10). These results suggest that a neocortical GABA deficit in subjects with schizophrenia leads to impaired cortical inhibition and that GABAergic synaptic transmission in visual cortex plays a critical role in OSSS.
Subfields: Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, Cognitive Neuroscience
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Citations in the corpus
- Interneuron dysfunction in psychiatric disorders (2012, result): “Indeed, deficits in cortical inhibition have been reported both in vivo and in analyses of post-mortem brain tissue from patients with schizophreni”
- Current practice in the use of MEGA-PRESS spectroscopy for the detection of GABA (2012, neutral): “…studies that hypothesize strong relationships between GABA-MRS measures and behavioral function (e.g. Edden et al., 2009; Puts et al., 2011; Yoon et al., 2010) from the outset, or examine experimentally-induced changes within session due to a task (Floyer-Lea et al., 2006; Michels et al.,…”