9 research outputs found
Structural aging of human neurons is the opposite of the changes in schizophrenia
Human mentality develops with age and is altered in psychiatric disorders,
though their underlying mechanism is unknown. In this study, we analyzed
nanometer-scale three-dimensional structures of brain tissues of the anterior
cingulate cortex from eight schizophrenia and eight control cases. The
distribution profiles of neurite curvature of the control cases showed a trend
depending on their age, resulting in an age-correlated decrease in the standard
deviation of neurite curvature (Pearson's r = -0.80, p = 0.018). In contrast to
the control cases, the schizophrenia cases deviate upward from this
correlation, exhibiting a 60% higher neurite curvature compared with the
controls (p = 7.8 x 10^(-4)). The neurite curvature also showed a correlation
with a hallucination score (Pearson's r = 0.80, p = 1.8 x 10^(-4)), indicating
that neurite structure is relevant to brain function. We suggest that neurite
curvature plays a pivotal role in brain aging and can be used as a hallmark to
exploit a novel treatment of schizophrenia. This nano-CT paper is the result of
our decade-long analysis and is unprecedented in terms of number of cases.Comment: 24 pages, 5 figures. arXiv admin note: text overlap with
arXiv:2007.0021