White Matter Differences in Individuals at Clinical High Risk for Psychosis – Findings from the SHARP Project
Poster B41, Tuesday, October%209, 11:30%20am%20-%201:00%20pm, Essex%20Ballroom
Sinead Kelly2,6, Ofer Pasternak2,4, Yingying Tang1,2,3, Elisabetta del Re2,8, Guusje Collin2,6,7, Marek Kubicki2,4, Yogesh Rathi2,4, Tianhong Zhang1,3, Junjie Wang1, Huijun Li5, Kristen Woodberry6, Lihua Xu1, Zhenying Qian1, Anni Zhu2, Susan Whitfield-Gabrieli7, Margaret Niznikiewicz8, Robert W. McCarley8,11, Larry J. Seidman6,10,12, Matcheri Keshavan6, Jijun Wang1,3, Wiliam S. Stone6, Martha E. Shenton2,4,9; 1Shanghai Key Laboratory of Psychotic Disorders, Shanghai Mental Health Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, Shanghai, China, 2Psychiatry Neuroimaging Laboratory, Department of Psychiatry, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 3Brain Science and Technology Research Center, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China, 4Department of Radiology, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 5Department of Psychology, Florida A&M University, Tallahassee, FL, USA, 6Massachusetts Mental Health Center, Public Psychiatry Division, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 7McGovern Institute for Brain Research and Poitras Center for Affective Disorders Research, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, USA, 8Department of Psychiatry, Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, Brockton Division, Brockton, MA, USA, 9Research and Development, Veterans Affairs Boston Healthcare System, Brockton Division, Brockton, MA, USA, 10Department of Psychiatry, Massachusetts General Hospital, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA, 11Passed away on May 27, 2017, 12Passed away on September 7, 2017
White matter (WM) microstructural differences measured with diffusion tensor MRI (DTI) have been consistently associated with psychotic disorders and may be apparent prior to illness onset. The prodromal phase of these disorders typically occurs in a period of development when significant changes in brain structure and function occur, raising the possibility that disruptions in these processes contribute to the development of psychosis. To investigate WM differences before the onset of psychosis, we used diffusion data from the Shanghai at Risk for Psychosis (SHARP) study including 92 healthy controls and 159 individuals at clinical high risk (CHR) for psychosis who were largely medication-naïve, and group matched for age and sex. Using tract-based spatial statistics in FSL, the ENIGMA-DTI protocols were run on fractional anisotropy (FA) maps. The average FA was extracted within nine WM regions of interest (ROIs) previously implicated in psychosis, including the whole corpus callosum (including body, genu, and splenium), anterior limb of internal capsule, anterior corona radiata, uncinate fasciculus, superior longitudinal fasciculus, and average FA across the WM skeleton. After FDR correction, CHR individuals showed reduced FA in the uncinate (p=0.04), and in the corpus callosum (p=0.04), including the body (p=0.04) and splenium (p=0.04). In the CHR group, 22 individuals later converted to psychosis, however, no significant FA differences were observed between converters and non-converters at baseline. We plan to follow-up these analyses with measures from free-water imaging as it is hypothesized that elevated FW may be associated with an acute response related to the onset of psychosis.
Topic Area: Neuroimaging