Auditory Event-Related Potentials in Antipsychotic-Free Subjects With Ultra-High-Risk State and First-Episode Psychosis

Conclusion: Our study is one of the few studies focused on drug-naive or minimally treated patients at pre- or early-psychotic states. Our results exhibited impaired performance in sensory gating and deviance detection shown by certain parameters. A longitudinal study with larger sample sizes will be helpful to provide more evidence to elucidate the role of antipsychotics on an individual’s neurophysiological performance at different stages of psychosis.IntroductionNeuroscience tools have been widely employed in schizophrenia research in recent decades (1–3). Neurobiological impairments precede the onset of a full clinical syndrome. Therefore, we can delineate psychopathological progresses by careful assessment throughout the pre-psychotic and early-psychotic states (4). Among the various neuroimaging methods, auditory event-related potentials (ERPs) have been utilized to study normal versus defective information processing of neuropsychiatric disorders, such as schizophrenia (1, 3, 5). Successful processing of sensory inputs requires two kinds of ability: sensory gating, the ability to inhibit intrinsic responses to redundant stimuli, and deviance detection, the ability to facilitate responses to less frequent salient stimuli (6). Using ERP components as measuring instruments, P50/N100 suppression represents the extent of inhibitory failure (impaired sensory gating), while MMN (mismatch negativity) indicates the magnitude of impaired deviance detection. Both pr...
Source: Frontiers in Psychiatry - Category: Psychiatry Source Type: research