Original ArticleHeritability of Brain Morphology Related to Schizophrenia: A Large-Scale Automated Magnetic Resonance Imaging Segmentation Study
Section snippets
Participants
Two hundred twenty-one healthy volunteers, 169 patients with schizophrenia, and 183 unaffected siblings of patients with schizophrenia were included in this study (Table 1). This sample largely overlapped with the one used in our VBM study (22) but was not identical, because the two methods involved separate processing streams and quality control subjects and a few images met quality criteria for only one method (see Imaging and Preprocessing section). Subjects were recruited nationwide in an
Demographics
Table 1 shows demographic information separately for each diagnostic group, which were altogether representative of participants in this case-control study. To ensure there were no confounding age or gender interactions, preliminary GLM models were performed including gender-diagnosis and age-diagnosis interactions. No significant interactions were found in dorsal striatum, cortical GM, or hippocampus, although age-diagnosis was significant in the left lateral (p = .021) and third (p < .002)
Discussion
The present study assessed volume changes and heritability of brain morphological phenotypes associated with schizophrenia with a large sample of patients with schizophrenia, unaffected siblings, and healthy volunteers. A sophisticated, fully-automated method was used to process structural brain images and divide them into a number of cortical and subcortical structures. The results provide confirmatory evidence for several widely reported morphological phenotypes in schizophrenia, demonstrate
Conclusions
The results of this study support several commonly reported volumetric differences associated with schizophrenia, including reductions in hippocampal and total cortical GM volume, ventricular enlargement, and widespread volumetric increases in dorsal striatum. Although no volumetric differences were observed between unaffected siblings and normal control subjects in these regions, evidence for heritability of reduced GM volume as a schizophrenia-associated biologic trait was found in both
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