The link between grey matter and psychosis, in unprecedented detail
An international team of researchers partly supported by the EU-funded PRISM 2 and AIMS-2-TRIALS projects have found a link between a lower volume of grey matter in the brain and early-onset psychosis (EOP). Their findings could help increase our understanding of the role of psychosis in brain development during childhood and adolescence. Occurring before the age of 18 – at a critical period of brain development – EOP is a severely debilitating condition that includes schizophrenia, affective and other non-affective psychotic disorders. It is associated with adverse long-term outcomes – patients have more severe and long-lasting symptoms and are less responsive to treatment. Although changes in grey matter had previously been reported in EOP, the small sample sizes used and different brain regions examined in these studies led to conflicting results. Published in the journal ‘Molecular Psychiatry’, the current study is the largest ever whole-brain imaging study of EOP and has revealed valuable new information about the illness. To obtain the unprecedented details revealed, the brain scans of 482 individuals with EOP were compared with those of 469 healthy ones.
Gaining more insight for the future
“Early Onset Psychosis can have a devastating impact on a person’s life and wellbeing, but our understanding of the illness is still sadly relatively limited,” states study senior author Dr Matthew Kempton of AIMS-2-TRIALS project coordinator King’s College London in a news item posted on the university’s website. “This study, the largest neuroimaging analysis of EOP to date, used newly developed technologies to combine scans from different sites to examine hundreds of thousands of data points measuring volume in the brain. We found that people with EOP experience a lower volume of grey matter in nearly all regions of their brains compared to people without the illness. This detailed map will hopefully provide the basis for future research, as it could help as a diagnostic tool, and even track the effectiveness of treatments,” Dr Kempton goes on to say. The scans also revealed a marked difference in grey matter volume in the left median cingulate – an area of the brain associated with the formation and processing of emotions, learning and memory. Additionally, people who developed EOP at a later age had lower volumes of grey matter in a number of small brain regions than individuals with an earlier age of onset. Study first author Shuqing Si, also of King’s College London, notes: “Grey matter’s primary purpose is to process information in the brain and plays a significant role in day to day functions like memory, emotions and movement. This study used specially created software (ENIGMA-VBM) developed at King’s that can accurately map where there have been local increases and decreases in brain volume. It’s allowed our team to process significantly more data and has meant that our sample reflects brain scans from many parts of the world. The effectiveness of this software means we’re now investigating the brains of those with several other disorders.” The PRISM 2 (Psychiatric Ratings using Intermediate Stratified Markers 2) project ends in May 2024. AIMS-2-TRIALS (Autism Innovative Medicine Studies – 2 – Trials) ends a year later, in 2025. For more information, please see: PRISM 2 project website AIMS-2-TRIALS project website
Keywords
PRISM 2, AIMS-2-TRIALS, brain, grey matter, psychosis, early-onset psychosis