Dost Ongur1; 1McLean Hospital, Harvard Medical School
Brain connectivity abnormalities have been reported in individuals with psychotic disorders both in first episode and chronic illness. But it is not clear how these abnormalities emerge and progress and how they relate to symptom formation. To address these questions, our group has been collecting resting state functional MRI (rsfMRI) data on a 3 Tesla Siemens Trio scanner from patients with first episode psychosis at McLean Hospital’s early psychosis clinic McLean OnTrack as well as from matched healthy comparison subjects. Participants are men and women between the ages of 18 and 30. We recruit patients with bipolar disorder with psychosis, schizoaffective disorder, and schizophrenia and assess them clinically and with cognitive testing at each visit. Most patients in our studies are receiving antipsychotic medications. All are scanned at baseline and at 1 and 2 years follow up. To date, we have scanned over 50 patients at baseline as well as over 30 healthy controls. 30 patients have returned for 1 year and 15 for 2 year scans. Initial analyses indicate that first episode patients show the same reduction of connectivity in the frontoparietal control network we previously reported in chronic psychosis (Baker et al JAMA Psychiatry 2014). The pattern is similar in individuals with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. We observe a significant correlation between mania severity and reduced connectivity within the ventral attention network. In ongoing analyses, we are conducting sliding window analyses and single-subject based cortical parcellation.
