Abstract
Schizophrenia is a syndrome that is typically accompanied by delusions and hallucinations that might be associated with insular pathology. Music intervention, as a complementary therapy, is commonly used to improve psychiatric symptoms in the maintenance stage of schizophrenia. In this study, we employed a longitudinal design to assess the effects of listening to Mozart music on the insular functional connectivity (FC) in patients with schizophrenia. Thirty-six schizophrenia patients were randomly divided into two equal groups as follows: the music intervention (MTSZ) group, which received a 1-month music intervention series combined with antipsychotic drugs, and the no-music intervention (UMTSZ) group, which was treated solely with antipsychotic drugs. Resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scans were performed at the following three timepoints: baseline, 1 month after baseline and 6 months after baseline. Nineteen healthy participants were recruited as controls. An FC analysis seeded in the insular subregions and machine learning techniques were used to examine intervention-related changes. After 1 month of listening to Mozart music, the MTSZ showed increased FC in the dorsal anterior insula (dAI) and posterior insular (PI) networks, including the dAI-ACC, PI-pre/postcentral cortices, and PI-ACC connectivity. However, these enhanced FCs had vanished in follow-up visits after 6 months. Additionally, a support vector regression on the FC of the dAI-ACC at baseline yielded a significant prediction of relative symptom remission in response to music intervention. Furthermore, the validation analyses revealed that 1 month of music intervention could facilitate improvement of the insular FC in schizophrenia. Together, these findings revealed that the insular cortex could potentially be an important region in music intervention for patients with schizophrenia, thus improving the patients' psychiatric symptoms through normalizing the salience and sensorimotor networks.
Highlights
Neuropsychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, display a complex and diverse neurobiology, which has long been associated with difficulty in distinguishing between the “self ” and “non-self,” as well as with an uncertainty regarding whether one’s actions and thoughts are independent from external influences
18 MTSZ, UMTSZ, and healthy controls (HCs) were included in the following analysis
To the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to assess the effect of long-term music intervention on the insular neural circuit in patients with schizophrenia
Summary
Neuropsychiatric conditions, such as schizophrenia, display a complex and diverse neurobiology, which has long been associated with difficulty in distinguishing between the “self ” and “non-self,” as well as with an uncertainty regarding whether one’s actions and thoughts are independent from external influences. Various passivity symptoms, such as auditory verbal hallucinations, thought insertion, and emotion processing, especially in response to emotional stimuli, may be caused by these experiences. Recent studies of patients with schizophrenia showed that music intervention could significantly improve psychiatric symptoms (Mössler et al, 2011; Lu et al, 2013)
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
