Figure 3.

Neural system-level dysconnectivity in schizophrenia – emerging biomarkers. (A) Results from a recent large connectivity investigation examining thalamo-cortical connectivity alterations in 90 patients diagnosed with schizophrenia relative to 90 matched healthy controls (38). Anticevic and colleagues found robust alterations in thalamo-cortical information flow in schizophrenia, whereby sensory-motor cortical regions showed over-connectivity in schizophrenia (regions shown in yellow-red), but prefrontal-striatal-cerebellar regions showed under connectivity in schizophrenia relative to controls (regions shown in blue). Anticevic and colleagues fully replicated this pattern in an independent sample. Woodward and colleagues, using complementary approaches, found highly comparable effects (37). (B) A similar pattern of over/under connectivity was identified in patients with schizophrenia when using a DLPFC seed region identified via GBC; as with the thalamic seed, there was increased coupling with sensory (posterior regions, shown in yellow-red) but reduced connectivity with prefrontal and other higher-order temporal regions (shown in blue). This over/under pattern recapitulated qualitatively the observations found for the thalamic analysis in (A), as shown in the distribution plots on the bottom of each panel. Note: figures adapted with permission from Anticevic and colleagues (38) and Cole and colleagues (11).