Volumetric Abnormalities in Violent Schizophrenia Patients on the General Psychiatric Ward

作者：FengJu Liu, Yang Shao, Xin Li, Li Liu, Rong Zhao, Bin Xie, Yi Qiao · 发表于：Frontiers in Psychiatry · 年份：2020 · DOI：10.3389/fpsyt.2020.00788 · 被引用次数：16 · 研究领域：Psychopathy, Forensic Psychiatry, Sexual Offending、Schizophrenia research and treatment、Healthcare Decision-Making and Restraints

BACKGROUND: In recent years, neuroimaging has been used increasingly to explore the biological underpinnings of violence carried out by schizophrenia patients (SPs). Studies have focused mostly on patients with a history of carrying out severe physical assaults, or comorbid with substance abuse/personality disorder (SA/PD). As a result, participants were unrepresentative and the interpretation of brain-structure changes was confusing. Here, we concentrated on SPs on a general psychiatric ward with a history of relatively lower violence, and individuals comorbid with SA or PD were excluded. We expected to identify the characteristics of brain morphometry in this population, and to explore whether the morphometric changes were universal. METHODS: Forty-eight violent schizophrenia patients (VSPs), twenty-seven non-VSPs (nVSPs) and 28 nonviolent healthy controls (HCs) were investigated. Voxel-based morphometry was used to evaluate the gray matter volume (GMV) of all study participants. Whole-brain analyses were used to reveal group effects and differences between any two groups. Correlation analyses were undertaken between significant brain regions and behavioral measurements in the VSP group. RESULTS: Patients showed a significantly smaller GMV in widespread frontal, temporal, and limbic regions compared with HCs. No region was found in which the two patient groups had significantly larger volumes compared with that in HCs. A significant decrease in the GMV of the right fusiform...