Altered auditory seed-based functional connectivity in other specified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder compared to schizophrenia spectrum disorders
PMC13036032
· 10.1038/s41537-025-00708-9
Gap Declaration
In SSD, hallucination severity correlated positively with STG–Heschl’s gyrus and TP–insula connectivity whereas negative symptoms correlated negatively with STG–insula connectivity. These findings suggest that there are distinct differences in FC between patients with OSSO and patients with SSD, which supports the proposal that OSSO should be treated as a separate clinical syndrome with distinct neural connectomes. Future research may explore whether interventions targeting these altered connectivity patterns could help reduce the risk of progression from OSSO to SSD.
Abstract
Few neuroimaging studies have examined other specified schizophrenia spectrum and other psychotic disorder (OSSO). We sought to identify features differentiating patients with OSSO from those with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (SSD) and healthy controls (HC) using auditory seed-based functional connectivity (FC) analysis. Patients with OSSO (n = 88), patients with SSD (n = 81), and HC (n = 85), matched for age, sex, and education, underwent resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (rs-fMRI) and clinical evaluation. To reduce heterogeneity of OSSO, individuals with specific subtypes of OSSO, i.e., pure delusion and delusion with attenuated auditory hallucinations (AHs) were only included. Using five auditory seeds, we conducted seed-to-voxel and seed-to-region of interest (ROI…
Conclusions / Discussion
Discussion Clinical and neuroimaging research on OSSO has been very scarce. Our study focused on auditory seed-based FC differences between OSSO and SSD, with HC as a reference group. Compared with OSSO, SSD patients showed greater connectivity between the STG and precuneus and between the TP and precuneus, whereas both patient groups showed overall hypoconnectivity relative to HC. These findings highlight that, although OSSO and SSD share common overall auditory-network abnormalities, connectivity alterations involving precuneus differ between the two groups. The most distinctive feature differentiating OSSO from SSD was the greater connectivity between the STG and precuneus in SSD. The STG is a higher-order cortical region integrating polymodal sensory inputs and serving as a major substrate for language processing. It also integrates information from the two visual systems dealing with the “what” and “where” aspects of perception and is critically involved in emotional prosody processing. The precuneus, a central hub of the DMN, is implicated in self-referential processing, spatial awareness, and aspects of consciousness. This aberrant coupling between the STG and precuneus may …
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