Hyper-Activated Brain Resting-State Network and Mismatch Negativity Deficit in Schizophrenia With Auditory Verbal Hallucination Revealed by an Event-Related Potential Evidence

Qiaoling Sun,Liwen Tan,Yehua Fang,Yongyan Shi,Jinhong Chen,Xuemei Peng,Lifeng Wang

doi:10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00765

Abstract

Schizophrenia is a holergasia with unclear mechanism and high heterogeneity. Auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) study might help in understanding schizophrenia from the perspective of individual symptoms. This study aimed to investigate the activities of the resting-state networks (RSN) in the electroencephalogram (EEG) and mismatch negativity (MMN) in task-related state of schizophrenia patients with AVH. We recruited 30 schizophrenia patients without any medication for more than 4 weeks (15 AVH patients and 15 Non-AVH patients) and 15 healthy controls. We recorded the EEG data of the participants in the resting-state for 7 min and the event-related potential (ERP) data under an auditory oddball paradigm. In the resting-state EEG network, AVH patients exhibited a higher clustering coefficient than Non-AVH patients and healthy controls on delta and beta bands and a shorter characteristic path length than Non-AVH patients and healthy controls on all frequency bands. For ERP data, AVH patients showed a lower MMN amplitude than healthy controls (p = 0.017) and Non-AVH patients (p = 0.033). What’s more, MMN amplitude was positively correlated with clustering coefficient, and negatively correlated with characteristic path length on delta, theta, beta and gamma band in AVH patients. Our results indicate that AVH patients showed a hyper-activity in resting-state and may have impaired higher-order auditory expectations in the task-related state than healthy controls and Non-AVH patients. And it seems reasonable to conclude that the formation of AVH may occupy certain brain resources and compete for brain resources with external auditory stimuli.

Highlights

Schizophrenia, which typically starts between late adolescence and early adulthood, is characterised by incompatibility among thought, behaviour, emotion and the surrounding environment [1, 2]
The schizophrenia patients and healthy controls were matched with respect to age, gender and education level
The two patient groups had no significant difference in PANSS positive symptom, negative symptom and general psychopathology

Summary

Introduction

Schizophrenia, which typically starts between late adolescence and early adulthood, is characterised by incompatibility among thought, behaviour, emotion and the surrounding environment [1, 2]. Schizophrenia has always been regarded as a whole in research; this approach is inaccurate owing to the heterogeneity of the disorder [4]. Schizophrenia from the perspective of individual symptoms may be understood [5]. One of the most prevalent symptoms of schizophrenia is hallucination [6], which refers to an illusory perception [7] that occurs in the absence of external stimulus and with a clear consciousness state. Auditory verbal hallucination (AVH) involves the perception of speech in the absence of external sensory stimulation, occurs with a 50%–80% probability [8] and is the most common hallucination of schizophrenia. The study of independent AVH may be conducive to understanding schizophrenia [9]

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