PET imaging reveals widespread brain receptor deficits in schizophrenia
· News-MedicalA groundbreaking study using positron emission tomography (PET) imaging has found that patients with schizophrenia had significantly lower muscarinic acetylcholine M1 receptor availability (~13% to 19%) across multiple brain regions compared with healthy individuals. Reductions in M1 receptors affect several brain regions involved in cognition, learning, memory, and executive function. The findings in Biological Psychiatry, published by Elsevier, provide the first in vivo evidence supporting widespread M1 receptor deficits in schizophrenia.
Schizophrenia is a serious mental disorder that is heterogeneous in its expression and biology. For many years, abnormalities in the brain's muscarinic acetylcholine system, particularly the M1 receptor, have been implicated in the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. However, nearly all of the evidence came from postmortem studies, making it impossible to determine whether these abnormalities were present in living patients or how they related to clinical symptoms.
Deepak C. D'Souza, MBBS, MD, co-lead investigator, Department of Psychiatry, Yale University School of Medicine; Psychiatry Service, VA Connecticut Healthcare System; and Abraham Ribicoff Research Facilities, Connecticut Mental Health CenterThe development of a novel PET radiotracer for the M1 receptor provided a unique opportunity to directly measure M1 receptor availability in the living brain. Although receptor availability is not identical to receptor density, it is widely accepted as a useful proxy for the brain's functional M1 receptor system. This allowed us, for the first time, to confirm that muscarinic dysfunction is a feature of schizophrenia in living patients."
Source:
Journal reference: