Abstract

MEG resting-state differences as a marker of clinical subtype in schizophrenia

Author(s): Jose M Manzano, Juan J Munoz, Juan M Santos, Anahi Serra, Tomas Ortiz Alonso, Gabriel de Erausquin

A resting-state magnetoencephalography (MEG) can discriminate different subtypes of schizophrenia. We studied a sample of 45 male patients (age range was 27 to 55 years old) with schizophrenia diagnosis from San Juan de Dios Hospital (Ciempozuelos, Madrid, Spain) equally distributed among paranoid (n=15), residual (n=15) and disorganized (n=15) subtypes according to the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM-III-R Axis I Disorders (SCID-I). Healthy controls (N=20) are males, matched by age and sex at the Magnetoencefalografíe Center “Dr. Perez-Modrego” (Madrid, Spain), without current or past neurological and/or psychiatric illness of any sort, including substance abuse.

When we estimated the ability of the predominant symptom dimensions to segregate the resting MEG amplitude profiles using canonical discriminant analysis, three discriminant functions DF) were extracted, explaining 52% (χ2=584.291, p<0.000), 25% (χ2=323.354, p=0.115) and 22% (χ2=155.037, p=0.289) of the total variance respectively. Our findings are consistent with the idea that clinical dimensions of schizophrenia derived from the predominant clinical syndrome are an expression of specific dysfunction of the brain subsystems of the default network.