1. Evidence for Corticostriatal Dysfunction During Cognitive Skill Learning in Adolescent Siblings of Patients With Childhood-Onset Schizophrenia
- Author
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Wagshal, Dana, Knowlton, Barbara Jean, Suthana, Nanthia Ananda, Cohen, Jessica Rachel, Poldrack, Russel Alan, Bookheimer, Susan Yost, Bilder, Robert Martin, and Asarnow, Robert Franklin
- Subjects
Serious Mental Illness ,Pediatric ,Basic Behavioral and Social Science ,Behavioral and Social Science ,Mental Health ,Neurosciences ,Schizophrenia ,Clinical Research ,Brain Disorders ,Aetiology ,2.1 Biological and endogenous factors ,Mental health ,Adolescent ,Age of Onset ,Brain Mapping ,Child ,Cognition Disorders ,Frontal Lobe ,Humans ,Learning ,Magnetic Resonance Imaging ,Neostriatum ,Siblings ,cognitive skill learning ,striatal dysfunction ,genetic risk ,fMRI ,Medical and Health Sciences ,Psychology and Cognitive Sciences ,Psychiatry - Abstract
Patients with schizophrenia perform poorly on cognitive skill learning tasks. This study is the first to investigate the neural basis of impairment in cognitive skill learning in first-degree adolescent relatives of patients with schizophrenia. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to compare activation in 16 adolescent siblings of patients with childhood-onset schizophrenia (COS) and 45 adolescent controls to determine whether impaired cognitive skill learning in individuals with genetic risk for schizophrenia was associated with specific patterns of neural activation. The siblings of patients with COS were severely impaired on the Weather Prediction Task (WPT) and showed a relative deactivation in frontal regions and in the striatum after extensive training on the WPT compared with controls. These differences were not accounted for by performance differences in the 2 groups. The results suggest that corticostriatal dysfunction may be part of the liability for schizophrenia.
- Published
- 2014