Archival ReportAssociation of Cortical Glutamate and Working Memory Activation in Patients With Schizophrenia: A Multimodal Proton Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy and Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study
Section snippets
Methods and Materials
A final usable sample of 1H-MRS measurements was obtained for 90 subjects (35 control subjects, 36 medicated patients, and 19 unmedicated patients). To achieve that, a total sample of 105 subjects was initially included for the study, and the exclusion criteria reported below were applied. The full sample consisted of 41 patients with schizophrenia who were on antipsychotic medication, 41 matched healthy control subjects, and a smaller sample of 23 patients with schizophrenia who were free from
Task Performance
In line with previous studies, we found differences in WM performance between conditions (task condition effect: F1,200 = 188.92, p < .001) and groups (F2,200 = 7.73, p < .001) (Supplemental Table S3, Supplemental Figure S2B, C). There was no condition-by-group interaction (F2,200 = 0.70, p = .50). Compared with healthy control subjects, Bonferroni-corrected post hoc tests indicated numerically lower 2-back performance in medicated patients (p = .053) and unmedicated patients (p = .42) (see
Discussion
The treatment of cognitive deficits in patients with schizophrenia remains an unmet clinical need (36). The aim of this study was to better describe how cognitive deficits arise from an assumed underlying neurochemical mechanism in the living brain in a sample of medicated and unmedicated patients with schizophrenia. The framework of functional imaging allows us to estimate the neuroenergetics during the performance of a task, while 1H-MRS provides estimates of neurotransmitters relevant for
Acknowledgments and Disclosures
The study was supported by funds from the German Research Council (Grant No. SCHL 1969/1-2/3-1/4-1). JK is supported by the Charité Clinician-Scientist Program of the Berlin Institute of Health.
We thank all participants; Lorenz Deserno for valuable remarks to previous versions of the manuscript; and Rebecca Böhme, Anne Pankow, and the team of the Berlin Center for Advanced Imaging for additional support.
The project was presented at the Schizophrenia International Research Conference in Orlando
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