• Igor Nenadic, Raka Maitra, Soumyajit Basu, Maren Dietzek, Nils Schönfeld, Carsten Lorenz, Alexander Gussew, G Paul Amminger, Patrick McGorry, Jürgen R Reichenbach, Heinrich Sauer, Christian Gaser, and Stefan Smesny.
• Department of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy, Jena University Hospital, Jena, Germany. Electronic address: igor.nenadic@uni-jena.de.
• Eur Neuropsychopharmacol. 2015 Oct 1; 25 (10): 1661-8.

AbstractHippocampal pathology has been shown to be central to the pathophysiology of schizophrenia and a putative risk marker for developing psychosis. We applied both (1)H MRS (proton magnetic resonance spectroscopy) at 3Tesla and voxel-based morphometry (VBM) of high-resolution brain structural images in order to study the association of the metabolites glutamate (Glu) and N-acetyl-aspartate (NAA) in the hippocampus with whole-brain morphometry in 31 persons at ultra-high-risk for psychosis (UHR), 18 first-episode schizophrenia patients (Sz), and 42 healthy controls (all subjects being neuroleptic-naïve). Significantly diverging associations emerged for UHR subjects hippocampal glutamate showed positive correlation with the left superior frontal cortex, not seen in Sz or controls, while in first-episode schizophrenia patients a negative correlation was significant between glutamate and a left prefrontal area. For NAA, we observed different associations for left prefrontal and caudate clusters bilaterally for both high-risk and first-episode schizophrenia subjects, diverging from the pattern seen in healthy subjects. Our results suggest that associations of hippocampal metabolites in key areas of schizophrenia might vary due to liability to or onset of the disorder.Copyright © 2015 Elsevier B.V. and ECNP. All rights reserved.

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