Does hypofrontality expand to global brain area in progression of schizophrenia?: a cross-sectional study between first-episode and chronic schizophrenia.

Abstract Although to date there have been no conclusive pathophysiological findings in support of the degenerative theory of the etiology of schizophrenia, the results of neuroimaging studies have suggested that progressive changes in the brain do occur during the clinical course of schizophrenia. However, there has been no report on alterations in regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) under resting condition, which was compared between the first-episode and the chronic patients of schizophrenia and healthy controls. Therefore, in this study, we applied three-dimensional stereotactic surface projection analysis of resting SPECT (3D-SSP SPECT) in patients with first-episode ( n  = 18) and chronic schizophrenia ( n  = 23) and age-/sex-matched healthy controls ( n  = 40). The rCBFs in the middle/inferior/medial frontal gyrus and the anterior cingulate gyrus were significantly decreased in both patient groups, relative to the respective controls ( Z  > 3.0, P