Brain Functional Connectivity in Mentally Healthy Individuals with Different Levels of Schizotypy

Human Physiology. 2022. Vol. 48. No. 5. P. 487–495.

Lebedeva I., Panikratova Y., Pechenkova E.

Schizotypy, a set of behavioral traits related to an enhanced risk for mental disorders, is an informative model for the investigation of early predisposition markers. We aimed to analyze correlations between the characteristics of functional brain organization and schizotypy in mentally healthy individuals. Mentally healthy participants (N = 80 in the main sample and N = 32 in the replication sample) underwent restingstate fMRI and Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ-74). Correlations between functional connectivity (FC) within and between the brain neuronal networks and four factors of schizotypy were analyzed. Additionally, we tested the whole-brain FC of the right medial frontal cortex for correlations with schizotypy (the region of interest was chosen on the basis of multicenter study of schizotypy associations with brain anatomy). Statistically significant results were tested in the replication sample. The FC within the ventral attention/salience network correlated with negative schizotypy, whilst the FC within the default mode network was associated with disorganization schizotypy (the results did not survive the correction for multiple analyses). Lower FC between the right medial frontal cortex and a temporal-occipital region in the left hemisphere correlated with higher cognitive-perceptual schizotypy, which may reflect deviations in emotional and motivational mediation of visual perception. These results, however, were not replicated in the second sample. Further research in this direction should engage larger samples and take into account a wider spectrum of parameters (psychometric, neuropsychological, and neuroimaging).

Keywords: functional connectivity, resting-state fMRI, функциональные связи мозга, фМРТ покоя, schizotypy, SPQ-74, шизотипия