Gray Matter Volume Abnormalities in Schizophrenia: Comparisons Between P -Value and Effect Size Inference Frameworks Using Mega- and Meta-Analyses

作者：Xin Li, Wenshuang Zhu, Zhen Zhao, Yingying Xie, Hao Ding, Liyuan Lin, Xiaotong Du, Xiaotong Wei, Yu Zhang, Luli Wei, Yi Ji, Zhongyu Chang, Juanjuan Ren, Liping Liu, Xiangrong Zhang, Lina Wang, Hongjun Tian, Xijin Wang, Wei Liu, Xiaodong Lin, Chen Zhang, Gang Wang, Bin Zhang, Chunshui Yu, Wen Qin · 发表于：Schizophrenia Bulletin · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.1093/schbul/sbaf085 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：Schizophrenia research and treatment、Functional Brain Connectivity Studies、Advanced Neuroimaging Techniques and Applications

BACKGROUND AND HYPOTHESIS: Identifying generalizable brain imaging markers from large multi-center datasets remains challenging due to varying statistical aggregation approaches and p-hacking with increasing big data. We hypothesized that effect size (ES) inference surpasses P-value-based inference in reliably identifying core brain damage of schizophrenia, regardless of whether Mega- or Meta-analyses are used. STUDY DESIGN: We examined voxel-wise inter-group differences in gray matter volume (GMV) based on individual data from 976 schizophrenia patients and 801 healthy controls across 16 datasets, along with published coordinates data from 103 studies involving 5151 patients and 5438 controls, using Mega-analysis (Mega), Image-Based Meta-analysis (IBMA), and Coordinate-Based Meta-analysis (CBMA) under P-value and ES inference frameworks, respectively. We then compared the performances of different statistical aggregation (Mega, IBMA, and CBMA) and statistical inference (P-value and ES) strategies in revealing brain abnormalities in schizophrenia. STUDY RESULTS: P-value Mega identified significant GMV abnormalities in nearly all gray matter voxels (94.85%) with high sensitivity to sample size; in contrast, ES Mega detected core abnormalities in only 24.63% of voxels that had large ES and manifested higher resistance to sample size. ES IBMA and CBMA also demonstrated superior detection performance and were less affected by sample size than P-value ones. Finally, IBMA exhibited...