Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 30, 2004|Volume 32, Number 28

Schizophrenia: Brain area governing hearing may prove key to diagnosis of illness

An abnormal pattern in an area of the brain that governs hearing may be an accurate method of diagnosing schizophrenia, according to a study by Yale researchers and collaborators.

"These results seem to point to a cardinal abnormality in schizophrenia," says Dr. Godfrey Pearlson, professor of psychiatry at the School of Medicine, director of the Olin Neuropsychiatry Research Center at the Institute of Living in Hartford, and senior author of the study published in Biological Psychiatry. "Using this imaging test, we were able to identify patients with schizophrenia with 97% accuracy."

Pearlson, Vince Calhoun and Kent Kiehl later replicated their initial finding with an independent sample and achieved a 94% rate of accuracy. Calhoun and Kiehl have appointments at the Olin Center and Yale.

Currently, the clinical diagnosis of schizophrenia is based on a constellation of psychiatric symptoms. The mental illness also has been associated with both structural and functional abnormalities in neocortical networks including frontal, parietal and temporal regions of the brain, but there has been no diagnostic test for the disorder.

Abnormalities in auditory cortex structure and function are prominent features of the brains in persons with schizophrenia, particularly in the superior temporal gyrus (SRG). Reduction in size of the SRG may correlate with the severity of auditory hallucinations and of formal thought disorder. owever, all of these previously documented anatomic differences overlap significantly with those of healthy controls and are thus not useful for diagnosis, note the researchers.

"Therefore, this newly reported functional brain change results in almost total separation of patients and healthy controls in two independent samples, and thus has possible diagnostic utility," Pearlson says.

Data were collected from two locations. One group consisted of 17 outpatients with chronic schizophrenia matched with 17 healthy persons in Vancouver, British Columbia. Another group consisted of eight patients and eight healthy persons in Hartford.

"These results have the potential to provide a powerful, quantitative clinical tool for the assessment of schizophrenia," Pearlson says.

-- By Jacqueline Weaver

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