Brain Scans Find Shared Network Disruption in 146 Schizophrenia and Bipolar Patients
Updated
Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 21
Brain Scans Find Shared Network Disruption in 146 Schizophrenia and Bipolar Patients
3 articles · Updated · ScienceAlert · Aug 21
Summary
Resting-state fMRI scans of 89 people with schizophrenia and 57 with bipolar I disorder showed lower whole-brain synchronization than 45 healthy controls, pointing to a shared reduction in coordination across distant brain regions.
The study mapped 90 brain regions and found altered links in networks tied to memory, emotion, attention, vision and sensory processing; schizophrenia showed broader disruption, including changes in sound, language and face-recognition regions not seen in bipolar disorder.
Some attention-to-memory and attention-to-emotion connections were stronger than in controls even as sensation-and-movement networks were weaker, suggesting the disorders involve reorganization of communication rather than simply lower brain activity.
The findings add biological overlap to evidence that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder share about 70% of genetic influences, but the scans did not track symptom severity and are not usable as an individual diagnostic test.
Limits include the small sample, one-time scans, mixed illness stages, possible medication effects and coarse network mapping, leaving larger pre-medication studies to test whether these patterns predict onset or treatment response.