Microstructural Brain Pathology in Paranoid Schizophrenia (According to Magnetic Resonance Tractography)

Abstract

Background: inconsistency of the obtained results of research on the pathology of microstructural connectivity in schizophrenia on the basis of tractography, absence of clinical application of special MRI techniques justify the need to continue scientific search in this direction. Objective: to identify the features of microstructural pathology of the brain in paranoid schizophrenia. Patients and methods: 25 patients diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia (F20.0) were included in the main group, 30 healthy subjects without neurological and somatic diseases made up the control group. Instrumental studies were carried out on a Philips Ingenia magnetic resonance tomograph (magnetic field strength 1.5 T) using a DTI pulse sequence. Subsequent processing was carried out using “DSI Studio” (software for the analysis of tractor data). Results and discussion: the resulting microstructural brain changes demonstrated differences in the microstructural connectivity of the brain in patients with paranoid schizophrenia compared to the control group. Significant connections were revealed (at the given parameters for constructing connectivity matrices) between the hippocampus and the cingulate gyrus, the hippocampus and thalamus, thalamus and structures of the striopallidar system, and the absence of significant connections between the amygdala in the main group compared to the control group. The results of graph theoretical analysis of neural network indicators of the brain demonstrated higher values of indicators of “clustering” and the “small world” coefficient, characteristic path length, transitivity, density, and lower values of the global efficiency indicator of the main group compared to the control group. Conclusion: the obtained results demonstrate microstructural semiotics of neural network changes of brain in paranoid schizophrenia. Changes in the connectivity of the hippocampus, thalamus, and amygdala appear to be important tractographic semiotic features of the microstructural pathology of the brain in paranoid schizophrenia. The study is one of the stages of the search for a method of objectification and detection of disruption of brain neuroplasticity processes in the endogenous pathology of the schizophrenic spectrum.