This article is more than 5 years old. Information may no longer be current.

Accelerated functional brain network aging observed in psychosis

Patients with psychotic disorders had accelerated aging of two functional brain networks that support cognitive function — the frontoparietal network and cingulo-opercular network — according to a cross-sectional study published in Biological Psychiatry.

Prior research has shown that patients with psychotic disorder have accelerated brain aging compared with healthy individuals, but only one study has examined accelerated aging of functional networks in schizophrenia and none have examined whether these networks extend to psychotic bipolar disorder, according to Julia M. Sheffield, PhD, from Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and colleagues.

Using resting-state functional MRI and cognitive data from 240 patients with psychotic disorder and 178 healthy control participants, the researchers examined whether the brain functional networks showed evidence of accelerated aging. They also evaluated the associations between network efficiency and cognition and whether lower network efficiency was present in early-stage psychosis.

The investigators calculated global efficiency to measure functional integration for the frontoparietal network (FPN), cingulo-opercular network (CON), subcortical network and visual network. They also compared their associations with age and cognition between groups.

Sheffield and colleagues observed significantly stronger relationships between efficiency and age in patients with psychosis than in healthy controls for both the CON (psychosis: r = –0.37; controls: r = –0.16) and FPN (psychosis: r = –0.31; controls: r = –0.05). As observed in prior findings, efficiency of these two networks correlated with cognitive function across all patients. In addition, patients with chronic psychosis showed lower FPN efficiency compared with healthy participants (P = .004); however, this was not seen in patients with early psychosis (P = .553).

“These findings may explain network abnormalities observed in chronic patients that are often not observed in first-episode psychosis,” Sheffield and colleagues wrote.

The researchers did not observe accelerated aging in the subcortical or visual network, which may indicate specificity for cognitive networks that decline earliest in healthy aging, according to the results.

"The accelerated decline was specific to cognitive networks, providing evidence that accelerated aging is not due to a global reduction in efficient communication across the whole brain," Sheffield said in a press release. "With advances in cognitive remediation and the positive impact of exercise on connectivity of these networks, our findings provide hope that young adults with recent onset psychosis will benefit from interventions bolstering connectivity within these networks, potentially slowing down or normalizing the rate of decline in efficiency and, therefore, cognitive function. – by Savannah Demko

Disclosure: The authors report no relevant financial disclosures.