Brain structural imaging study in schizophrenia patients with violent aggressive behaviors

Abstract

Objective To review recent neuroimaging studies of aggressive/violent behaviors in schizophrenia and related the neural circuits of aggressive behaviors, focusing on structure magnetic resonance imaging(MRI) method, published from 2000 to 2014. Methods A systematic literature search was conducted using articles from PsycINFO, Embase, Pubmed and Cnki published between 2000 and 2014, we usedaggressive,violent,schizophrenia,structure MRIas the key words, to explore the relationship between schizophrenia of aggressive/violent behaviors and the related neural circuits. Results Of the 18 studies included in the analysis, mostly were case-control studies, two were written in Chinese.The neuroimaging literature on aggression in schizophrenia revealed the related grey matter volume of brain areas which contained the frontal lobe, temporal lobe, amygdala, hippocampus, cerebelum and caudate nucleus. Conclusion Findings from the current reviews suggest that the occurrence of violent/aggressive behaviors of schizophrenia were related with serval neural circuits as the frontal-temporal cognitive circuit, Papez circuit, cerebellum advanced cognitive circuit and caudate nucleus-reward seeking circuits. However, the precise violent/aggressive neural mechanism has yet to be studied further. Key words: Violent/aggressive behavior; Schizophrenia; Structure magnetic resonance imaging