Functional neuroimaging and schizophrenia: a view towards effective connectivity modeling and polygenic risk.

Functional neuroimaging and schizophrenia: a view towards effective connectivity modeling and polygenic risk. Dialogues Clin Neurosci. 2013 Sep;15(3):279-89 Authors: Birnbaum R, Weinberger DR Abstract We review critical trends in imaging genetics as applied to schizophrenia research, and then discuss some future directions of the field. A plethora of imaging genetics studies have investigated the impact of genetic variation on brain function, since the paradigm of a neuroimaging intermediate phenotype for schizophrenia first emerged. It was initially posited that the effects of schizophrenia susceptibility genes would be more penetrant at the level of biologically based neuroimaging intermediate phenotypes than at the level of a complex and phenotypically heterogeneous psychiatric syndrome. The results of many studies support this assumption, most of which show single genetic variants to be associated with changes in activity of localized brain regions, as determined by select cognitive controlled tasks. From these basic studies, functional neuroimaging analysis of intermediate phenotypes has progressed to more complex and realistic models of brain dysfunction, incorporating models of functional and effective connectivity, including the modalities of psycho-physiological interaction, dynamic causal modeling, and graph theory metrics. The genetic association approaches applied to imaging genetics have also progressed to more sophistic...
Source: Dialogues in Clinical Neuroscience - Category: Neuroscience Tags: Dialogues Clin Neurosci Source Type: research