Emotion Processing in Women with Schizophrenia Is Menstrual Cycle Phase and Affective Valence Dependent: An fMRI Study

Adrianna Mendrek,Nadia Lakis,Julie Champagne,Josiane Bourque,Annie Dubé

doi:10.5402/2012/656274

Adrianna Mendrek, Nadia Lakis + Show 3 more

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https://doi.org/10.5402/2012/656274

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Abstract

Despite a large number of functional neuroimaging investigations of emotion processing in schizophrenia, very few have included women. In the present study 21 schizophrenia and 23 healthy women underwent functional MRI (3T) on two occasions (during the follicular and luteal phase of their menstrual cycle) while viewing blocks of emotionally negative, positive and neutral images. During exposure to negatively charged images patients showed relatively less activations than controls during the luteal phase, but no between-group differences were observed during the follicular phase. In contrast, the exposure to positively valenced material produced no significant interaction, but the main effect of group; schizophrenia patients exhibited less activation than healthy controls during both phases of the menstrual cycle. This is the first study demonstrating that atypical neural activations associated with emotion processing in women diagnosed with schizophrenia depend on the menstrual cycle phase and on the affective valence of presented stimuli.

Highlights

Schizophrenia is a complex and clinically heterogeneous psychiatric disorder with unknown etiology, age at onset in late adolescence/early adulthood, and a lifetime prevalence of approximately 1% [1, 2]
One of the hallmark characteristics of this devastating disorder is a disturbance in emotion processing, which has been demonstrated in numerous behavioral, physiological, and functional neuroimaging investigations that employed tasks ranging from passive viewing of emotional material, through to facial emotion identification and emotional memory [3,4,5,6,7,8]
In one of our ISRN Psychiatry previous studies of sex differences in emotion processing in schizophrenia, we observed a different pattern of cerebral activity between male and female patients [22], and we have subsequently found that the symptom profiles correlated differently with brain activations [23]

Summary

Introduction

Schizophrenia is a complex and clinically heterogeneous psychiatric disorder with unknown etiology, age at onset in late adolescence/early adulthood, and a lifetime prevalence of approximately 1% [1, 2]. In our recent study we have observed diminished activations during retrieval of negatively valenced emotional material but enhanced activations during positively valenced condition in clinically stable schizophrenia patients relative to controls [8]. One important factor to consider is affective valence of presented stimuli. Another important variable is gender of tested individuals, as numerous studies in the general population have demonstrated significant differences between men and women in brain activations during performance of emotional tasks (e.g., [16,17,18,19,20])

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