Neural Mechanisms of Anhedonia in Schizophrenia: A PET Study of Response to Unpleasant and Pleasant Odors
CONTEXT Loss of the capacity to experience pleasure (anhedonia) is a core clinical feature of schizophrenia. Although functional imaging techniques have been successful in identifying the neural basis of cognitive impairments in schizophrenia, no attempts to date have been made to investigate neural...
Saved in:
Published in | JAMA : the journal of the American Medical Association Vol. 286; no. 4; pp. 427 - 435 |
---|---|
Main Authors | , , , , , , |
Format | Journal Article |
Language | English |
Published |
Chicago, IL
American Medical Association
25.07.2001
|
Subjects | |
Online Access | Get full text |
Cover
Loading…
Summary: | CONTEXT Loss of the capacity to experience pleasure (anhedonia) is a core clinical
feature of schizophrenia. Although functional imaging techniques have been
successful in identifying the neural basis of cognitive impairments in schizophrenia,
no attempts to date have been made to investigate neural systems underlying
emotional disturbances. OBJECTIVE To study the neural basis of emotional processing in schizophrenia by
exploring the pattern of brain responses to olfactory stimuli in patients
and healthy volunteers. DESIGN Positron emission tomographic study of patients with schizophrenia and
healthy volunteers. Positron emission tomographic data were collected between
July 21, 1995, and September 11, 1997, and data analyses were conducted in
1999-2001. SETTING The Mental Health Clinical Research Center at the University of Iowa,
Iowa City. PARTICIPANTS Sixteen healthy volunteers with a mean age of 29.5 years and 18 patients
with schizophrenia and a mean age of 30.0 years. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE Areas of relative increase or decrease in regional cerebral blood flow,
measured using positron emission tomography and the [15O]water
method while participants performed an emotion-induction olfactory task to
determine response to pleasant (vanillin) and unpleasant (4-methylvaleric
acid) odors, compared between patients and healthy volunteers. RESULTS Patients with schizophrenia subjectively experienced unpleasant odors
in a manner similar to healthy volunteers but showed impairment in the experience
of pleasant odors. The analysis of the regional cerebral blood flow revealed
that patients failed to activate limbic/paralimbic regions (eg, insular cortex,
nucleus accumbens, and parahippocampal gyrus) during the experience of unpleasant
odors, recruiting a compensatory set of frontal cortical regions instead. CONCLUSION Abnormalities in the complex functional interactions between mesolimbic
and frontal regions may underlie emotional disturbances in schizophrenia. |
---|---|
Bibliography: | ObjectType-Article-2 SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1 ObjectType-Feature-1 content type line 23 ObjectType-Article-1 ObjectType-Feature-2 |
ISSN: | 0098-7484 1538-3598 |
DOI: | 10.1001/jama.286.4.427 |